Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 93: Castlevania's portable legacy

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

Castlevania superfan Shane Bettenhausen joins Bob and Jeremy to discuss the next set of vampire-slaying classics to go under the retrospective lens: The series' six "Igavania" entries for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.

This week in Retronauts, whipping it in your pants. 80,000 titles to choose from. Get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial at audibletrial.com slash game. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of Retronauts, Shane. You look horrified. Your little tagline at the beginning was kind of, I don't know, nasty and low class.

It's Castlevania on a portable system. I guess in this year, the level of discourse has truly been lowered. Wow. Did you just compare me to the administration? I'm not saying he should not be named, but, yeah. Like the first where you go straight to a low sexual pun where we're talking about one of the most revered franchises in console history.

Okay. Also a dead franchise. So let's just get it out of the way, shall we? Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and apparently I'm crass. And this episode of Retronauts is about portable Castlevania games, not the Game Boy ones. Was there one in Game Gear?

There wasn't. No. Not the mobile ones. Not the LED handheld ones. Just the Gameboy bands. Wait, we can't talk about Game.com? No. But I play using it in a video night.

Was that released ever? I didn't think so. It was at the same E3 with Metal Gear Solid. They were like, this should not exist. Let's not release this. So who are these in any form? Who are these dudes who are also on the podcast? I'm Bob Mackey. I'm always here.

And who else is here? This is Shane Bettenhausen guest, frequent guest. Because who better to talk about Castlevania with us? Apparently, actually, you weren't on the most recent Castlevania episode, which was Castlevania Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. No, it actually saved that for like months to prepare myself. I wanted to save it for right before this one. So I just listened to it last week, and I got really, really, you know, kind of excited, yet angry a few times.

Angry. You tend to get angry. Angry about it. Well, I mean. Usually at me. Potentially, you know, it's someone who hasn't played one of the most important games. It just kind of pops up with like a random, like, hey, you should download this ROM idea about it. I'm nothing personal about that.

I say, download them ROMs, boys. But, you know, I felt like that Jeremy did a great job. You talked a lot. You had a lot to say. But I thought there were elements of Symmy of the Night and Renov Blood that were not explored for. Well, we only had an hour and a half. This is a post-show critique. This is true.

And then I was hoping when I got invited to do this one, you would not include one of the games that you are including today because I have actually written it out of the continuity. Which is Circle of the Moon? I know, I guess where we're starting. And reading your notes, I know we're going to clash a little bit today, so I'm kind of excited. And these games, you and I were both at OneUp EGM back in the day

when most of these came out. Yeah, actually, one of my, you know, I was always importing Castlevania games to play before they came out. and I have a fond memory of being in leaving Tokyo Game Show in, I guess, 2007, and we were at customs to, you know, do the immigration out of the country, and you passed over an advance review rom of Portrait of Ruin, and I played that all the way back from Japan. So, yeah, you and I were both, you know, huge fans of Sympanite going into this generation of GBA and DS games. So I think you and I were both also close to the projects in that we interviewed the team. multiple times, didn't stories. If you go back in Retronaut's history,

Shane was on the first couple of Castlevania episodes. There were at least three Castlevania episodes in the beginning of Retronauts. Yeah, I realize we're retrending some familiar territory, but we haven't really talked about these games. I mean, we've also grown in 10 years, I think,

as people and Castlevania fans. To think about these as retro games now also affords us, like, a lot of distance, and the genre has changed fundamentally and, like, changed hands. The genre is not kind of owned by Indies. And, like, it's interesting to see these games from that perspective.

I was actually really happy to revisit these, and my opinions have changed a little bit on some of the aspects of it, too. Yeah, I didn't play all the way through any of these in preparation, but I did play a little bit of all of them. Yeah, same here. Some of them hold up really, really well. Others, not so much, but we can talk about that. But, yeah, I think you guys did pretty much cover most everything important to think about something the night, and you can't think about these games except, you know, in view of the template that that struck. Yeah.

And that is a good place to start. So yeah, you know, And I do think that is kind of the inflection point for these games because, you know, Castlevania up until Symphony Night and even beyond, actually, a few years past, like once you got away from the NES, there was sort of this confusion about what is Castlevania? Like Super Castlevania 4 was its own thing. And then the next game that came along was Rondo of Blood, which was kind of like a throwback to Castlevania 3, but also like loaded with fan service, but also kind of like not really an official Castlevania. because it was called Dracula X, and it had the anime style, and it was kind of experimental. And then you had Bloodlines, which was much more of a traditional Castlevania game. So there was like this just kind of dancing around, like, what are we doing?

Do you remember how you felt that? I do. I remember being really excited that it was suddenly branching into all these three unique paths that all interrelated kind of, but had a unique view. It's kind, you know, like a little bit later, Mega Man would do the same thing, but not as well, maybe? Or, you know, maybe as well at times. Yeah, I was mostly frustrated because I loved. Castlevania 4, and I wanted another game like that, and we never got another game like that. The closest that I guess we ever had was the X-68,000 Castlevania, which I didn't even know

existed until, like, 1990,000. So after playing Super Castlevania 4, the next one you probably played was Bloodlines, and then you played Rodno Blood, eventually, right? I was familiar with Bloodlines, but I didn't have a Genesis, so I kind of like was familiar with it in, like... What about you, Bob? What about me? Did you play either of those at their initial release or no?

Bloodlines, and I played Super. I never had a Genesis. growing up. I was really excited for Casabana Bloodlines, having played Super Casabania 4. And at the time, it was like, whoa, this is such a throwback to Casabania 1 and 3, you know, whereas Rondo Blood had seen screenshots. So that was like an interesting throwback to three as well in a different direction. So like I played them in that order, Super Casabstania 4, you know, vampire killer bloodlines then,

Rondo. And like having played all those, around the time they were released, it was a really exciting thing to experience. I think my dark secret is I didn't actually like Castlevania until Symphony of the Night. I could appreciate it, but it was too hard. And, you know, interviewing I garashi as Jeremy and I did, and you did too, Shane, like, he made Castlevania Symphony of the Night for players who thought the other games are too difficult. Right. It works. I still have the experience of learning how to beat the Grim Reaper on the playground, you know, when I was in grade school.

Like, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Like, oh, you should use the Holy Water and have a triple multiple. Yeah. So, so Stephanie the Night, like, that, you know, we didn't, I think as Americans necessarily understand the lineage there, the fact that it was based on Rondo. of blood and was a sequel to that. I mean, even in the U.S. version, it said bloodlines was the pro-long.

Yeah, I was thinking of that. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of weird. So, like, you imported Knocked on the Moonlight, you know, I did, yeah. So when you first put it in and you realized this is the end of Rhonda blood, you were not, like, awestruck in the way that those are. No, I didn't know Rondo of Blood. See, like, that had really never happened before. I had seen Dracula X, but I hadn't really played it because I was like,

oh, that's not Castlevania for a sequel. I don't care about that. Well, so I think for younger people, it's hard to think back. they weren't there in experience, like, the first time you ever played a game that did that, the first time you ever played a game that instantly thrust you back into the climax of a previous game and let you relive it and then directly continue into the next game. So it was

astonishing. I didn't get the actual connection, but I still thought it was cool. I was like, wow, it's like the final battle with Dracula. And that was the first game that I ever imported was nocturn in the moonlight. So I guess we should talk about circle the moon suddenly now. Because like, following

that excitement. Where I'm going from this, where I'm going from this is that Symphony of the Night was kind of this sort of experimental offshoot also like they let them do it on PlayStation. It was kind of cool. They did some interesting things with 3D technology, but that's not really where Konami wanted to take Castlevania, where they really wanted to take it was

you know, to make it a 3D action game like Mario 64 and, I don't know, Crash Bandicoot or something. So you had Castlevania for Nintendo 64. That was like the next game. But that was a mess. Like they didn't even finish the game before they launched it. They ended up coming out with a, fixed sequel, which was actually

just the finished game. And I think you should actually do at one point like a micro about some of these other like bastard Castlevenias. Oh yeah. No, we'll do a full episode on it. But at the time, again, like we were suspect of Casabania 64. It looked blurrier and muddier and less fun than most N64 titles. And when it came out and was it kind of bad, nobody was shocked.

I was excited for it. I was like, wow, it's like sort of a modern era, Castlevania. It's like the early 20th century. It's an interesting disaster actually. Yeah. Then I played it and it wasn't. It does have skeletons on motorcycles, which is a nice choice. And after that, it's all downhill. Right.

It's also crazy long, actually. Especially the curse of darkness. Yeah. And it does some interesting things. Like you have, you know, the chainsaw chase with Frankenstein's monster or whatever through a maze. Like, there's weird stuff happening and it's creative, but it doesn't quite work. Right. And that's good because we, to think, what if they would have tried to recreate that on GBA instead of?

Oh, God. SOTN. Well, yeah, I mean, I think at that point, they started to realize Castlevania in, you know, 3D space, that's going to be tough. Around the time that Circle of the Moon was in development, you also had Dracula, oh crap, or Castlevania,

what was it called? Like, which one? Legacy, no, not Legacy. What platform? The Dreamcast one that never happened. Oh, resurrection? Yes, Castlevaked Resurrection. Yeah, made in the West.

It had like, there's like a, you can find footage out there of like a Medusa. It looks kind of tragic. I was glad it was canceled. Yeah, I mean, that was canceled probably because the Dreamcast failed. also I think because it did not look very good and it was a mess. I guess we're talking

about cancel. There's also a cancelled 32X Castlevania as well. But that's not relevant to this. A blip on the radar. Like where I'm going with this is that 3D Castlevania was not really a starter. Right. Well, and I think the central having to use a whip to attack in 3D is

difficult to do correctly. It is, yeah. It can be done, but they were having trouble with it. It's something that wasn't coming together for them. And so all of this leads to Game Boy Advance But wait, I have one question for you, Jeremy. What was Igorashi doing between

Symphony of the Night and Circle of the Moon? And I know he didn't do Circle of the Moon, but I was just wondering like, why was he not doing more Castlevania? Was he on the N-64 games? Was he... No, he was over... He had worked on Tokyo Making Memorial. Right, yeah. That was still pretty vibrant at that time. I was getting parted. So he worked on the PS1 and Saturn Ports of Tokyo Memorial.

I'm just curious as to where he went between Symphony of the Night and... He helped out on like the protea stuff sometimes. Oh, neat. Yeah, I mean, I can think that. He wasn't like... He wasn't, like, executive level or, you know, producer level at that point. It was, like, the guy who came in and helped out with Castlevania Symphony in the night when the director left. That's right. That's right. And he, like, hadn't been kind of appointed as the guy to spearhead everything.

That didn't happen until 2002. Right. And the other Castlevania is, like, Circle the Moon and in 64 were happening out of other parts of Tokyo, other parts of Konami. Okay. Yeah. I mean, in Kobe and stuff, not in Tokyo. Yes. All right, you guys are messing up my narrative here, but that's okay, because what we are ultimately leading to, ultimately leading to, is Castlevania Circle of the Moon.

Were you at Space World 2000? I was not. I was not in the games press until 2003. So I was there. I was my first trip to Japan. I was super excited. I would work for gamers.com. where they revealed the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance. That was a legendary show. It was. I always hear about it. Well, and like, it's funny, like, in lieu of the recent Switch reveal, like, I was like,

oh, you know, where are the models carrying the switches on stage like they had for that one? And so I remember I was excited to play Circle the Moon. It was one of the games that was playable directly after the presentation. And immediately, I'm like, I can't see this. It's so dark. That was my initial thought. Yes. That was everyone's thought.

Because remember, this system was not backlit. But let's talk about why this game happened and how it came to be. Basically, I feel like after all the time. troubles they had with 3D Castlevania games, they stopped and said, like, how can we make Castlevania work? And they looked to see what had worked, and they looked and said, you know, like the 2D games, those are still okay. Like, those have been pretty successful for us.

Castlevania Legacy of Darkness, maybe, or not Legacy of Darkness, legends. Castlevania Legends for Game Boy, like the very late Game Boy release. The one with Sonia Belmont. Yes, that they tried to tie Alley Card to. Which was only, I think, a year or two before this, actually. It was 1998. It was a really late game. Yeah, quite late.

And it was three years before this. Better than Castlevania Adventure, but not as good as Castlevania Adventure 2. It was a weird step backward. But, you know, aside from that one, they just looked and said, like, maybe doing the 2D games makes sense. And Game Boy Advance was the logical place to put those games because, you know, N64, GameCube, PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox. All of those were kind of pushing to next-gen graphics, which meant higher budgets, which meant, you know, more expensive games, large. development teams. But Game Boy Advance, that would allow them to create comfortable Castlevania experiences that, you know, could use a winning formula and not have to have

a gigantic team. And they could also reuse assets. So, like, it was just a very pragmatic choice. It's pretty clear if you play the launch lineup that there wasn't a whole lot of time for any of it. Yeah. You know, they probably only had like nine months or something. Right. So, you know, it's kind of clear at launch that a lot of the games don't tap into what's good about the GBA hardware. And I think in preview of episodes, you've talked about how early on, they really had to balance graphics versus sound, and this is a game early on that balanced on sound very heavily. And I think that is why many people have fond memories of this.

It's a fantastic sampled soundtrack attached to a terrible castamia. Well, the soundtrack is largely borrowed from the greatest hits of past games. It is, right? That's why I said, sample. Sampled, okay. I thought you might think the actual sampling going on. The sound actually is like, it's like streaming audio. Right.

That's why it's not generated by the Game Boy Advance. Right. Harmony of Dissinence would have generated, you know, PCM sound and people hate that. That's strange because I feel like we've gone on to appreciate that kind of music, that kind of sound later. Harmony of Dissinance also has other troubles, but we'll get there. But like, I remember being at EGM, and like people were just immediately like, oh, man, I love this music. It's some of the best tracks I remember from the last few games. I love this game immediately.

Yeah, I mean, the menu select screen or the character select screen has like Requiem from Rondo of Blood, which I had never even heard because I hadn't played Rondo. played yet because it hadn't come to the U.S. It was expensive. This is coming out of your little GBA at launch. Right. Wow. So there's like a woman singing to me for my GBA. That was kind of a gimmick for a lot of early launch games.

You know, Super Mario advance. Think about Toad. Think about Toad. Think about Toad speaking to me. Everyone made noises. He picks a vegetable. He's a... But, you know, I've always talked about, like, the weird sound design of Wario Land 4,

where you had, like, all kinds of... Like, weird, echoey, distorted sounds. But then you also had, like, that song that plays in the seaside stages. And then, like, you get stung by bees and it distorts and stretches. Like, people were really interested, I think, developers were really interested in what you could do with the Game Boy Advance's, you know, storage space and hard. and what you could do with sound, and you really kind of lost that later on. You know, the Wario team kept going with Wario Ware and then Rhythm Heaven, but everyone else was kind of just like, let's dial it back a little bit.

Do you think that's because Nintendo really just knew the hardware better and didn't have to work as hard, maybe? No, I think people, you know, there's, there's, when you're dealing with a limited platform like GPA and limited file size and, you know, storage space, everything you do is a tradeoff. So I think people decided that they wanted to trade in other directions, like scope or maybe have an FMV in there at the beginning or have nicer graphics or more characters. WarioLand 4 looks really good and also sounds really good. I don't know how they did that. Yeah.

But it wasn't launch. That's true. It was close. It was like August, I think. It was a few months. I guess they had first party. Yeah. I mean, I was playing the Japanese version in the summer of 2001.

That's true. So it was like two or three months after the system's launch. So it was not a late. Was Circle of Moon made by Kobe, or was it made by? Who made this one? Well, let's look at the notes. So Castlevania's Circle of the Moon was a Game Boy Advance launch title produced by KCE, Konami Computer Entertainment, Kobe.

Kobe. The team responsible for Castlevania 64. And also the Goaemon games, correct? Or is that Osaka? No, that was Osaka. Yeah, okay. But Castlevania 64 is the one we care about. So this is the people who made the messy, incomplete 3D Castlevania game,

making a messy kind of unbalanced 2D Castlevania game. So maybe they just had some troubles. But there were some interesting ideas here. It just didn't quite work out. Well, and like the darkness, I later I probably don't blame them as much. Because I bet when they were developing it, they were looking at it on a little monitor that was lit up, and they probably didn't have the final hardware

and didn't know how dark it was going on. Okay, we need to do a little more explaining here because you're talking from an inside perspective, like everyone knows what you're talking about. So when you look at this game on your GPA screen, you see kind of outline of the levels. I mean, it is dark. It's hard to look out. It's hard to figure out

what you're looking at. The original Game Boy Advance did not have a backlit screen. I mean, have a side lit screen. It had a barely reflective. The viewing angle was L.A. Slight. Yeah. I mean, this is retreading every web comic from that year, but I had to play this game outside because that was the only way

I could see it was sitting in my backyard on the porch. Maybe Bogtai. That was like the solution. It was like, it was. Stop complaining about the screen. I think Boktai was very much inspired by like the fact that, man, you can't see this game. My memories of the first year of Game Boy events are me sitting in a chair right next to a lamp and holding my game system at an angle just right so I could see what was happening on the screen. It was common to buy an accessory to project a light onto the front of your screen.

And Circle the Moon was a really exceptional case, I think. It was extremely bad because, you know, it's Castlevania. It's got to be spooky and dark. but you add that spooky darkness to a screen that is naturally just dark, dim. It was a difficult experience. And the art style itself, it's not exactly like any of the previous ones. It's kind of a mishmash, a little more serious and dull looking, I guess. Everything is just a little off.

I mean, I played it first. I downloaded them all for the Wii just to play them all again. I played it first. I'm like, oh, this is fine. And then I played Harmony of Distance immediately afterwards. I'm like, oh, no, there are like so many tiny things they don't get right. like the jumping, the moving, the menus are bland, the controls and Circle the Moon are really the biggest problem. So let's pull back a second and actually just talk about what this game is.

So Castlevania Circle of the Moon is the first portable Castlevania game to break from the just like traditional one level at a time structure and go into the Symphony of the Night style non-linear exploratory map out the castle style with equipment and a skill system and exploration and consumable items. The skill system is D.S. Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll talk about that. But basically, it is an attempt to kind of do the Symphony of the Night Thing. And it's very inelegant. But so to put it in the context of the time, you have to understand this was a Game Boy Advance launch title. And therefore, it was by far the best looking and sounding and one of the hugest, like in terms of scope and substance, portable games ever seen.

And not a rehash. A lot of the launch lineup was rehashed. Yeah, yeah. It was not a Mario advance. It was a brand new game. And that, I think, wallpapered over a lot of the problems, at least at the very beginning.

It's a really hard game to go back to, but at the time, it was kind of mind-blown. And it was our first follow-up from Sydney the Night, and even at the time we knew it wasn't the exact same development team, but they were clearly inspired by. So it was...

I like that the director's name is Koji. Right. Not to cut... Not Koji-Igarashi, it's Kodi. But for someone like me who always had a chip of my shoulder against Game Boy, It was a glimpse to, like, oh, man, I can actually embrace this console.

It's not going to be, you know, sloppy, has, you know, like, want to be games. I've always felt that, that of all the Castlevania games, like the portables, Circle of the Moon seems the most like a Genesis game, and that's not a knock on it. It's just like something about the visual style and the some of the play mechanics. Like, it just feels, it has that kind of like, you know, this isn't, you know, this isn't the comfortable Nintendo way of doing things, We're doing things our own way, and it's going to be a little different, but that's, like, learn to love it. It's funny you say that, because I've always felt that, too, a little bit, and it almost feels like it's like Sega trying to make a Castlemania game or something weird. There's something going on.

Part of it's the color depth, like, the way the graphics are designed. And, like, the way the characters look, and the controls, because, like, having come out of Super Castlemania 4 and assuming that I with really great deep controls that felt super tight for that franchise, which began with clunky controls. This felt like a step backwards. And that's not a knock on Sega or Genesis. It's just like, you know, the two platforms, Nintendo and Sega, always had a different way of doing things. And this feels like, you know, Castlevania was always really at heart, an Nintendo franchise. And this is like the weird kind of offbeat version. Like, if you were to take bloodlines and make it nonlinear, you'd probably come up with something that feels a bit like Circle of the Moon.

Now, the fact that the systems don't work, that's another story entirely. That doesn't have anything to do with the Sega feel of it. it's just like the overall impression it gives, the aesthetics of it. And I think the story also feels more like the blind story. It feels like it connects more to the original Castlevania. I mean, the original Dracula novel. Well, yeah, it does. I mean, it's, okay, so that's another important point is that, you know,

somebody in the night took the action away from the Belmont and put Alucard, the son of Dracula. Adding Mishon helped California's narrative immensely. Yeah, this guy is not pretty enough for me. Yeah. Who is his name, Chris? John Joe. Nathan Graves. Nathan, who remember, like, he's totally forgotten.

Yeah, he's, well, I mean, he's been reconed out of the series franchise, and the series has been reconed now. No, God, quit saying that. I know, just tears your heart. Have you played the new Pachinko game? I was going to say, yeah, Dracula's... The erotic violence? I love it.

The erotic violence. Back to the intro there. Yeah, so, so yeah, this does... It feels like it's somehow tied to the novel Dracula, even though it's not actually. Nathan Graves is like the protege of a guy named Morris Baldwin

which isn't quite the name of a character from the Dracula novel but it's sort of close. He's the worst Baldwin, but no wait, Billy's worse. It evokes a character Adam's pretty bad. The character's name from that. What? He's Trump is great. Oh, I mean, Alec. Sorry. Yeah, so what was I saying?

Right. So the protagonist. Does it actually fit into the previous narrative of California? Not really. No. No. It doesn't fit anywhere in the Castlevania narrative. Like, it takes place in, I want to say, like, the late 19th century. Sounds about right.

But it doesn't do anything interesting with that. There's no, you know. Right. And it's, it's once again, some person summoning Dracula from the grave. Well, and the entire game takes place inside the castle, if I recall correctly, right? There's nothing prior. Because with the succeeding games, we'll see, they start branching away from, oh, you're just in Dracula's castle. No, you're just.

The game begins with Dracula's resurrection. Yeah. And instead of, like, killing everyone, he just sends them to the basement. Yeah. They're granted. Go, go play in the basement, boys. So there's Nathan Graves, and then there's his friend, Hugh Baldwin, who is Morris Baldwin's son. Apparently, Morris Baldwin had beaten Dracula in the past.

And he gets captured at the beginning. And so Hugh and Nathan get dropped into the basement, and they have to go run off and do stuff. Anyway, Hugh becomes a bad guy. You meet him occasionally throughout. He's kind of a rival. That's a common theme in these games. It is. Like the second character always gets corrupted or whatever.

Yeah, I guess there's only so much you can do in the narrative of a guy who's running around Dracula's castle. But anyway, so that's kind of the introduction. And then from there, it becomes this big exploratory adventure and you kind of find your way around and you have to, you know, acquire different power-ups. Like early on you acquire the ability to do a double-tap dash, which helps you do longer jumps. That's where the game starts to fall apart, actually, because the control mechanics in this game are really weird. Like, Nathan walks at a really slow pace, and when you jump, he jumps really high, but it's very, very short, like, in terms of how far he jumps. So you basically spin the entire game double tapping and running because that way you can actually do a normal jump. So, like, I don't know why they incorporated that element to it because there's no really.

reason not to just double tap and run everywhere. And you get this right away, like within the first five minutes of the game. So for the rest of the game, anytime you want to go anywhere, you're double tapping. And it's just like this is a basic design element of the game

where it seems like they didn't really think it through. And to me, that's kind of emblematic of the entire circle of the moon experience. And as Shane said, they didn't have much time to put this together. So, you know, with another four to six months of development time, maybe this game could have been just perfect. But as it is, it just has this whole cascade of problems

that starts with the double jump or the double tap and just gets worse from there. Well, and it's interesting, you know, we're talking about six games here. And this is the one where I literally remembered absolutely no stages, no bosses. You know, when looking at screenshots, I'm like, yeah, I kind of remember this. But there's very few new ideas here. Yeah, it's a really weirdly balanced game, too. Like, some enemies, you know, you just hit them and they die. But other enemies, you just have to keep pounding on them and pounding on them. There's an experience system, so you kind of level up

as you go. But it seems like it kind of reminds me of the leveling mechanics from Mother for Famicom. Which is punishing. Yeah. It is very much that way. And I've never beaten this game legitimately because the final battle with Dracula is so

grueling. It's really bad. He flies all over the screen and he has like this chariot thing he's running around on and it takes forever to to destroy him. And he hits really hard. And, yeah, it's just like it's not fun. And so I ended up cheating and game-sharking myself, infinite potions.

And that's the only way I've been able to see the ending. And I suppose in theory, you could legitimately gain infinite potions. But here's the thing. There are consumable items in this game, but there's no shop. To get any consumable item, you have to get it as a random drop. And things like potions are not nearly as common as you would expect. So in order to actually have a stock of healing items, you just have to keep grinding and hitting enemies. And also, the basic DSS system, the cards that you collect, also many of those are random drops, right?

Yeah. There are a few that are set. Or place. Most of them are random drops. They're all drops, but there are a few enemies that you kill. And when you kill that enemy, you will get like a plot mandatory or mechanically mandatory DSS card. But otherwise, you have 20 cards total you can acquire And you're probably not going to find more than six or seven

In the course of the game The traversal is so not fun that farming stuff isn't fun either in this game And it's hard to see So it all kind of added up to like I want to love this, I didn't love it And I think at the time a lot of people made themselves like it And now all these years later many people were like, yeah, not so good And I don't think the cards had anything to do with the enemies that carried them either

Because in future games you'd be like, I want that thing soul I'll fight that thing until I get it Yeah, it was like most of the cards were planets. Like, one row of the cards was like Mercury, Venus, Mars, et cetera. And then the other row was like legendary beasts like salamander and dragon and stuff like that. And yeah, it didn't really have any connection to the enemies. There was no indication within the game of which enemy was going to give you cards. It's not like, okay, what do I kill now?

Yeah, I mean, it's like game facts delight right there. It's really not a game you can complete and master on your, your own Steam without like knowing, okay, I have to hit this enemy and keep killing it and eventually it will give me this drop. But some of the drops are almost essential to being able to complete the game. So do you want to explain how the DSS works? You know, I don't completely remember it. But you don't level things up, right?

You just get them and you connect them? I just played it. I mean, there are two rows of cards, 10 each, and you can connect one from the top row and one from the bottom row for a different effect. So there's like 100 effects. And some of them are like great, like, you know, elemental effects. some of them are kind of useless, but... And you use hearts, right?

There's an MP meter that recharge. Some of them are just passive boosts, aren't they? I think so, yeah, but the hearts are just for special weapons. Some of them, you have to, like, hit the R trigger. Yeah. And that'll activate your weapon. Can you combine the special weapon with the DSS? No, you're thinking of harmony of sense, okay.

Where they kind of reworked the DSS. Yeah, the hearts are just for special weapons in this game. Okay, I do remember that there are some combinations that are, there are some combinations that are, there's some combinations that are, like, really essential and amazing. And, like, there's a few that you'll want to use your most of the game, right? Yeah. Yeah. But you don't know what those are.

There's no indication of what they are. There's no way to know which enemies you have to kill to get those card combinations. It's very, very unintuitive. In Dark Souls, you'd like that. Dark Souls has better design this. Like, Dark Souls. It does.

Like, the things enemies drop makes sense. There's logic to Dark Souls. That's why it works. It's punishingly hard and dark. Man, this game was ahead of its time. Well, I'm the one not making a Dark Souls reference. This game is arbitrary and random. Yeah.

It's not fun. Not fun. And okay, I'm sure people are going to be angry about this. I know people love Circle the Moon. No, but you're wrong. Reassess your life. I just think you need to go back and play it and really like see Circle the Moon through eyes unclouded by nostalgia.

It's too late. We just got three one-star reviews on iTunes. In EGM, it got nines and tens, and I know these people, and at the time I was constantly fighting with them about it. I think it should get like a seven at best. I mean, I was in love of this game for the first two hours, and then after a couple of hours, I was like, I don't think I want to play this anymore.

So then I went back years later when, you know, the backlit SP came out, and I had a game shark, and I was like, okay, I'm just going to cheat my way to the end. and it wasn't really fun doing that either. Like, sucking the challenge out didn't make the game more interesting, but if I hadn't, the game would not have been interesting. It's just, it's a very rushed game. Quick question.

Is this game valuable in any form? No, it's not a hard game to come by. Well, and also, I remember at the time, you know, it was a huge hit here. It was one of like the must-have games at launch, but in Japan, no one was buying it. And that was me beginning to realize, wait a minute, people in the West love Castlevania, but people in Japan don't really give too much about this franchise.

So, that was Castlevania Circle Lemoon, the series' first nonlinear outing on a portable system. It was not a huge success in terms of design, but evidently it did really well. So they were like, let's make another one of those. But this time, they stepped back and they took the game away from Kobe, the Kobe studio, and gave it to Tokyo, and they put Koji Igarashi in charge of it. And I'm not sure how this came to be. I don't know if he went to them and was like, guys, he wanted to do it. have to let me design a Castlevania game because that thing, no, that's not good.

I can do better. I covered this one and I remember he was excited to do it. He was excited about the hardware, but then the challenges of the hardware hit him over the head because he wanted to do something very different than what had been done in Circle of the Moon. And he brought his dream team back together with the illustrator, Iami Kojima, and his composer, Mijer Yamane. And the idea was

to really expand on what he had done in Sylvain the Night, but for this new console. It didn't quite work out. This game has also played with problems. it plays better than Circle the Moon by far. It's not nearly as arbitrary and random, but it's still kind of a mess in a few ways. But I do appreciate the fact that there are some things

about Harmony of Dissinence that are very much a direct response to the problems of Circle of the Moon. So, for instance, you have the graphics. When you look at them now on a backlit system, they're really garish, but they were very bright and, you know, juice to the main character,

Just, Just Belemagne. Just Belmont. He has a glowing outline, like, Alucard. But there's also, like, red and blue in colors you're not used to seeing. Yeah, very... Well, I mean, part of that,

it comes down to the dual world system. Like, all the dual... All the garish colors are in sort of the alternate world. Right. But you don't realize that at first. But the graphics are much easier, much clearer on a normal GamePoint advanced screen.

garish on a backlit screen, but they worked at the time. So that was important. And also, on first look, they do look more like the graphics you remember from the style. It's a huge turn from what you saw in circle. Even leaves like a trail of like doppelgangers behind him as he walks. But I mean, yeah, like the overall art style is much more traditional symphony of the night style. Also, the way it juiced moves, they got rid of the double tap and they give you the ability to back dash and dash forward with the, are in left triggers.

It feels really good. Yeah, like you zip through the castle. And one of the interesting things about this is that the dashing does not affect the arc of your jump. Like, you don't get extra distance or height on your jump by dashing. So it's not like mandatory in that sense. It's just you can, you know, dash around really quickly

just to get through the castle, which turns out to be really important. But it's not busted in the same way that Circle the Moon had like that fundamental design interface issue, which is great. And then the skill system that you use is like the DSS system, but more integrated into Castlevania mechanics and a lot less random. Because the way it works is, I think the idea is that Juist is like he's Simon Belmont's grandson. So he taps into Saifa Belnades, like that part of his lineage to kind of be a mage-style vampire.

He's like a combination of Alicard and Belmont almost. I also wanted to interject real quick. This is also where the franchises start having different subtitles in America and Japan. And the Japanese are always really great. This one sub translates to... White Knight Concerto. Yeah, White Knight Concerto. Wasn't this actually called Castlevania in Japan for the first time?

Yeah, they allotted together. For like two or three games, they called a Castle. They were like, well, no, back to Accomajo Dracula. There's another system, which is kind of meaningless but fun, where you decorate a room. You collect random decorations throughout this game. And also, you mentioned the two, like the alternate castle, this two world setup. We'll get to that. But I'll say they do introduce that very quickly in the game, which is,

weird too coming out of something the night you expect them oh is there going to be an upside down castle what will happen and this game kind of throws it at you we'll talk about that but yeah like the the skill system is what I want to talk about because it really does feel more like an attempt to make DSS work as a Castlevania system but there are fewer things to collect though

overall than in circle the moon I remember thinking you have a lot of magic spells but the way it works is you get a magic spell and then you can pair that with the subweapon right so there are a few subweapons the traditional subweapons right so you have like the axe the boomerings the dagger, the holy water, et cetera.

So you get these things and you can either cast the spell on its own or you can use a sub weapon on its own, but you can also combine them. So if you have like the ice spell and the boomerang, the cross, then it creates like this series of sharp ice daggers that flies around you, kind of like a shield, and then darts forward and sort of like machine guns enemies. There's all kinds of stuff. If you can do like frozen rain and holy fire, water, I don't even know. Like there's a ton of different options and most of them are actually really valuable.

So it becomes very customizable, situational. Unlike the DSS, it's always pretty intuitive what your abilities are going to do. And they feel like a natural extension of, you know, the existing Castlevania subweapon mechanics. So it works really well. That's one of my favorite things about this game, actually. They do tend to make the game a little easy once you master them. I remember some of the bosses were, like, you know, decimated. If you can figure out what the right thing to do against them, a little bit Mega Man's style.

The bosses in this are a point of contention because pretty much, all of them are just larger versions of normal enemies. Right. So there was the sense of like, oh, I don't have any good ideas. I guess I should also mention this is also where you start to see some sprites you might have remembered from the... All your favorites are back. Well, and at this point, at this point, it was like, oh, this is an interesting way to do

variation on a theme. I mean, Symphony of the Night did that. Right. And you had like the Spear Knights and you had Slagra and Guybon. Right. And at the time, it's like, oh, as a Cassavania fan, I love that these recurring motifs are coming back. I like that it's giving me the service I want.

And at the time, it didn't quite feel like a rehash or that they're, like, cutting corners yet. Yeah, actually, Circle of the Moon, I don't think they reuse sprites because they all look a little weird. The Axe Knights look weird. They don't throw the axis the right way. This, it was like, oh, remember these sprites from Civil the Night and Rondo Blood? They're great. I'm glad they're back at this point. So this is, you know, kind of a traditional Castlevania in that, you know, you do have the magic system, but your basic weapon is a whip.

However, in this one, you're allowed to customize your whip with different attributes. Some of them are just like you can do the whip spin from Circle of the Moon. or you can do like the limp thing from Castle 84. But there are other attributes like I think like a power stone. They can break walls and things like that. So they definitely

played around to that and they really did try to say like let's make a you know symphony style adventure but let's put a Belmont in it and let's see how that works. But it has a big failing and we kind of touched on that which is the two castle system. I mean I don't think it's as big of a failing

as you. It is confusing. I'm with Sam, I'm kind of, I mean, it's not ideal, but I can deal with it, you know. Well, the problem I have with it is initially, so I get what they were trying to do. Like, they said, you know, we had the big reveal of the second castle at the end of 70 of the night, and that was really cool. Which some gamers never even knew. Right. So how can we do that again, but make it more of an integrated element of the game?

So what they did was they basically gave you two castles to explore. Like a front and back. Right. and they're like one is a parallel dimension basically and they're interwoven which you don't realize at first but basically when you go through certain doors you're passing through a portal between dimensions

so you like are running around and fighting through the castle and all of a sudden you're in this like weird space where you know it's like the normal levels but in the background there's like clouds and rivers of lava and stuff and you're like what's that's weird and the colors are ugly

and it turns out that you're actually like crossing between dimensions. And once you get to a certain point in the game, it becomes clear that there are the two parallel castles. And so then the challenge becomes like, how do you navigate to the place you want to be in the correct dimension? And there are some interesting puzzles built around that.

There's like one room where you have to like throw switches and stuff and there's like balls that roll. But for the most part, it just doesn't quite work because everything is sort of spread out. It's really difficult to get from one place to another quickly, even with the warp rooms, because you do have that, like, that potential to be shunted between dimensions and end up in a completely wrong space. And the layouts don't match as much as you think they're going to, right? And it is confusing. But it was, it was different. But it made

it really difficult to get the full exploration of the castle, I remember. Yeah. And it just, to me, it just sucks the fun out because navigating the castle isn't intuitive or, or fun. Like, it doesn't make, well, it doesn't make physical sense. And I'll say the moment-to-moment level design here is not nearly as good as it was in symphony the night. And you can tell. It's a little underbaked. I played a bunch of these in a row recently, so I can't remember. How was this represented on the map?

Is it confusing to read? Because I can't really remember. There are two maps. There are two maps. And that's confusing when you first see it. You're like, where am I? Oh, and like, yeah, they're different colors. It's like they played the Goonies, too, and we're like, oh, yeah, okay.

But they did it wrong. But I will say, I was kind of a defender of the game. I think I gave it a nine. I think it's probably more of an 8, but it was definitely the direction I wanted the franchise to be going as opposed to Circle the Moon. It was a big improvement over Circle the Moon, which I recognized at the time. I loved it at the time, but, you know, this is one of those things where, like, each game that comes out is better than the last. So then you kind of have to recalibrate. You're like, oh, Circle the Moon wasn't actually that good.

Oh, Harmony of Dissonance? I guess it could have been better. Oh, are you in sorrow? Yeah, I guess maybe we'll ratchet that back a little. I'm surprised you didn't actually mention what is generally considered the huge problem with this game, which is the music. I didn't have a problem with it I want to say I think I mean I've talked about reviews in the past

how it's like a snapshot in time and they don't always age well and I feel like this is another case of that because it was a different choice made it sounds a lot like an NES game and I was reading old reviews like this sounds like an NES game that's bad but now we think like oh no those chip tunes are cool I listen to them you know in albums and things like that I think we've changed our minds

the melodies are good yeah they are yeah but at the time it wasn't what people wanted exactly yeah the melodies can be good but there's a lot of I think deliberate dissonance in the soundtrack and I think that's where they came up with the name for the U.S. subtitle is that the music does have this kind of

off-putting like a tonality to it. There are some real clashes in terms of music and I think you hear more of those in sort of the alternate dimension and that kind of helps set up the alien space. Like, you know, the opening track, Castle Indian Games always have just like this

great rousing let's go on an adventure style tune for the opening area and this one's no different. but then you start getting into the other areas and you get like these kind of you know it's all it's all like NES style PCM more like Game Boy style actually

I think it was basically Game Boy Hardware and the arrangements are just kind of sparse there aren't a lot of instruments in them at a time yeah yeah so so it's definitely in terms of like listenability it's a step back from Circle the Moon which again was basically

like taking Genesis music and PC engine music and streaming it yeah and people compare those two things as if that had been composed using that hardware. So it was an unfair comparison. Right. But I mean, this game is twice as big and has much nicer visuals. And, you know, so that was the tradeoff they made.

They were like, let's scale back on the music and just do hardware-based music as opposed to streaming music, but make the game better and bigger. And they did. And I think they made the right choice. But, yeah, that soundtrack was definitely a sticking spot for a lot of people. I bought the soundtrack on CD. I did. I think there's two. So step off.

There's two, like, arranged tracks on the two that are really good, yeah, yeah. Another thing, I think this game had some cool unlockables. There was a boss rush mode at the end that was fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can actually play as 8-bit Simon. Right. He was super slow. He's like, he's really, really strong, but he's really, really strong.

Really bad jumps, too? It's, yeah, like, he plays like 8-bit Simon Belmont. But he kicks ass because he's so powerful. Anyway, so, yeah, that game had its attractors, had its fans, but I don't think anyone can hate the next and final game in the Castlevenu series for Game Boy Advance, which was Ari of Sorrow, which is... That's my favorite. In many, I mean, some people put this right up there with Symphony in the Night. some people say Castlevania never got better than this. People have different opinions, but it's a masterpiece under any circumstance.

I know some people were really burnt out on Castlevania at this point. Like, oh, it's another 2D non-linear Castlevania game and didn't give this a chance. But man, Ari of Sorrow is so good. Actually, I kind of skipped the DS ones after this because I was burnt out. Now I'm like, how did I ever take these games for granted? I didn't know they would just stop coming. We were spoiled back then. We didn't know.

We didn't understand. So, yeah, Aria of Sorrow. I love it. As you took it as you took it to water. I actually do think in many, many ways it's the best one. And at the time, Ega was super excited because it was definitely the most ambitious and daring one. And he knew he was going to do this. Like, they were, when they made a harmony, they had the plans to make this one too.

And you can tell the logos are almost like inverses of each other. And this actually moved the narrative forward and got way deeper into the narrative that you wanted with Alicard. And he also realized like more connections to the previous games. Fans love this fan service. And, like, I remember the interviews for this one, just like, he loved the franchise. He's a fan. And he decided to go as deep as he could, just trying to, like, really give people something that was better than Symphony of the Night.

And I think he succeeded. I think it's a better game. I do love Symphony on the Night. It has some messiness to it that is charming. But this game feels like the work of someone who has learned a lot since then. Yeah, it's almost difficult to believe that Harmony of Dissinence and Ari of Sorrow came from the same team a year apart. Because this game is so much deeper, so much.

so much more polished, so much more substantial than harmony of dissonance. Like, everything about Ari of Sorrow just comes together perfectly. So let's start with, first of all, the setting. This was, like you said, it attempts to move the story forward. There is a tendency in, like, franchise fiction for people to be really reluctant to go past a certain point, like Star Wars, you know. It was a long time before we got the Force Awakens. And even now, we're doing all these prequels with Han Solo and Rogue One, Star Trek.

You know, we're getting Star Trek Discovery, which is a prequel to the original series. No one's going past Voyager and Deep Space Nine. I would also say that Castlevania is one of the guiltiest franchises in, like, you know, self-cannibalizing itself. How many times have we had stage one of Casabana, like literally 20? But this game is set in the middle of the 21st century. It was like set 30, 40 years in the future. To be fair, it does nothing with that, but I'm okay. You can get Pizucus and a handgun?

Laser gun. When Soba is wielding a laser gun, though. It's amazing. They could put a laser gun in Symphony and I wouldn't even blink twice, though. But there's a big narrative twist in that Dracula is dead. Like, he was destroyed once and for all. The castle was sealed into an eclipse in the year 1999. In events that we've still never really seen happen in a game.

So it's interesting that Ega decided to make this like Mcuffin of like this, here's the final battle for Dracula versus Belmont's that show not shown. You know, battle not shown. Right. That's been the biggest fan request and demand for years. It's like, we want the battle of 1999. Is this the game with Genia Arricado? It is.

Okay, they should have just renamed him Dr. Acula because it's like, duh, who do you think Dracula is in this game? Our protagonist is a spunky young teen named Somacruz. He's not really that spunky. He's more surly. He's a squall. He's a definite squaw. That's true.

But I like him. He was divisive. When he was revealed, I remember, like, oh, they're totally turning this into more anima. Another white-haired kid with a fur coat. Blue jeans. Yeah. He can have the pimp jacket on.

Yeah, it's kind of weird. And again, we said the same team. And again, the dream team, you know, Ayami-Kajima, Michelle Yamane, and Iga and his whole development staff. And the visuals, there's a continuity from Harmony. But you can tell that there's more new art, and again, it looks different. The color choices are different. It has probably the largest cast of any Castle Vining into this point, aside from the 3D ones. Because you have, you know, Soma and his girlfriend Mina.

And then there's Yoko Valnades. There's Hammer. Al Lookard or whatever. Adikado. And there's a hammer, hammer, there's Graham, the mysterious missionary. Right.

There's the mysterious J. Yes, the mysterious J. Yeah, so like there's lots of characters with beautiful, you know, Kojima portraits popping up. There's kind of a, you get introduced to lots of things quickly. There's a mystery to this game, too.

And you get thrust into it. And you don't actually know where it's going. Right. And it doesn't begin in the way the previous games that began. Yeah. Yeah. It begins with,

with Soma and Mina going to a, to a shrine in Japan, and it happens to be during an eclipse, and all of a sudden they wake up and they're in the castle, which is inside the eclipse. And they're like, what the hell is going on? And they're attacked by monsters and Soma lashes out against one in desperation

and consumes its soul and suddenly has the power to command. And he's like, I don't know what's up with this, but I guess the only way for us to get out of here, according to this strange guy in a suit, is that I have to go, like, fight my way out. And so you start running around and trying to figure out with the mystery. That soul collection, I remember, instead of this is what I've always, wanted in

Castlevania. It kind of gives you a little bit of Pokemon in your Castlevania in the best... The tactical

soul system. Oh, the best possible way. It gives you a reason to fight enemies over and over again besides experience,

which this game also has. And you know what they're going to drop. There's no mystery to you're like, I want this soul.

I want the Balchory soul, so I will kill the balcony. Every enemy has a soul. Yeah, pretty much. And then there are some souls that are like a one-time

thing that are essential to the plot, and then others that you can just collect. And there's a new game plus element to this, where you can start over... There's multiple new game plus elements.

Oh, yeah. But the best one is that you can keep all your souls except the plot, you know, plot-driven ones and start over with like, you know, your level one experience, but you have all your equipment and all your souls so you can just crush everything from the beginning. And I think compared to the previous two games,

we've had the cool subsystems. Here, they had a lot more ingenuity with some of these souls. And some of them have really interesting visual effects and just creative gameplay effects. Some of them are just goofy. Yeah, and some of them are very difficult to get. There are some enemies that appear very rarely. There's like one enemy that only appears once.

Right. You mentioned that it took me days of hunting that enemy to get that soul. I have great memories of it. Yeah, it's all very random. Like, sometimes you'll kill an enemy, and their soul will fly out and come into Soma. Most of the time, that doesn't happen. Some enemies are much more common than others. Like the peeping eye does not want to give up its soul, but bats, you'll have a million of those.

And your luck plays into it, and there's items you can equip to give. you a better chance of dropping souls. Yep. So you really, it's a game that that has benefits to playing around with different stats because your intelligence, you know, boosts the power of your souls.

But maybe you want to drop your intelligence so you can build up your luck so that you can collect more energy. Also, Soma can use a couple of whips or whip-like items. But for the most part, he just has, you know, every other kind of weapon from short swords to broadsords

to spears to handguns. And you can really kind of customize what you want. I love running around a handgun because even though it's weak, you can just, like, pump enemies full of lead. You can also find secret rooms really easily that way by shooting walls. I mean, as you spoke about in the 70-night episode, like the incredible depth to the armory and all the things you can equip like in the shield run. And this has a lot of that, too. They definitely expanded on the amount of things you could find and equip compared to the previous portable games.

A lot of little touches, little little things to discover, the secret little Easter eggs, extra polished. You can tell his team had a lot more time on this game. Right. And you can tell that they loved what they were doing because you get, again, like those goofy things, like you can kill the waiter, the waiter skeleton and collect its soul. And that lets you throw plates of curry, which basically works like the... Oh, God, I love that one. It works like, you know, kind of like holy water or the garlic or whatever.

Oh, wow. Where enemies walk into it and they take, you know, recursive damage. Or you can kill Persephone, the maid, like the karate maid that you meet in Symphony of the Night for the first time. And her soul is, it's like a skull-shaped vacuum cleaner. And you can run around and you can hit enemies with the vacuum cleaner. That's awesome. And it sucks up their life and gives it to you. There's just like so many little tiny creative things.

Yeah. That's something in the night's silliness that I like. If you find it, it's really great. And some of the souls have really unexpected benefits. Like there's a waterfall that you can pass through to get some hidden items. But if you try to run into it, some will be thrown back. And it doesn't seem like there's any passive ability that'll get you through that. But there's a couple of enemies that basically, they're like stands from Jojo's bizarre adventure.

And they like appear behind you. and they cause you to go darting forward. There's Valky and Devil and a couple of others, and those will push you through with enough speed and force that you can break through the waterfall. But you have to figure that out. There's just so much depth to this game and so many little things hidden.

And then on top of that, it has a really interesting story, like a really unexpected plot twist and actually a couple of plot twists. Yeah, and more story than the previous games. There are more interjections. You meet more characters. You just feel more connected to what's happening. And they do a good job of,

connecting to, you know, Castlevania lore like Yoko Belnades is descended from Sifel Banades. Jay has an important part to play. Graham is not connected to the past, but he thinks that he's the reincarnation of Dracula. And so he becomes like Soma's rival because Soma has Dracula-like powers, which there's a reason for that. I mean, you know, we're glowing about this game. One of the criticisms I do have is given the premise, it isn't quite as, you know, innovative with futuristic stuff in different environments. There is a little bit of, you know, repeated motifs from previous games here. And the level design, again, not as amazing as parts of something to the night.

And it's hard, it's hard to remember specific levels in this game compared to something of the night. But at the time, this was by far the apex. Like, you know, it was a must-have game, like, you know, a 10 out of 10 for a lot of people. Well, I like the, I like what Jay turns out to be because he looks very Dracula-esque-esque with his mustache and his beard. He's like an older man. even though he's got kind of reddish hair, you're like, is this guy Dracula? Because he's running around and kind of keeps threatening Soma. And then there's Graham who wears all white and seems to be like a nice guy until kind of later on he starts to feel threatened by Soma and gets a little mean.

But then it turns out Julius is, or J is Julius Belmont, who sealed Dracula and then lost his memory because of the stress of the battle. And Graham is a guy who thinks he's Dracula, but isn't because Dracula is actually Soma. and Soma is kind of like a second chance for Dracula to determine his course. Like, does he become evil or does he live a more righteous life? Oh, that leads to the fantastic bad ending of this game. Yeah. Go ahead. Talk about it.

Well, if you don't have the proper stuff to move forward, the main character is a becoming Dracula. And it's ultimately bad depressing ending. And it was the first one I got. And I was like, oh, man, he could just like went full dark on me. I love it. Yeah. And the second game actually does, the sequel doesn't even better job with that.

But you can play as J. There's like Julius mode. And so it kind of continues that. There is no second castle to this game. Like they, I think they decided, you know, maybe that's not what we want to do. It was kind of a development shortcut in Symphony the Night. Like let's expand the game by turning our assets upside down. And this one, what they do is they basically reveal like a hidden area that you can go to.

It's sort of like the secret heart of the castle. And it's not that big, but it is something you could only reveal by completing the right conditions. And you have to fight Julius and beat him with the right conditions equipped, I think. Or do you have to fight Graham with the right? I think you have to fight Graham. And then when you do that, then you can unlock him. Play as Julius. And that's a bit like the Richter mode of the previous games where he's a more traditional strong character.

But he does level up in this one? Or is that in Donaldson? Well, since I played that. One of them, okay, maybe it's Donomsar. Because I think it's pretty hard to make it through with him. I did it, though, because it's worth it because there's more stuff to unlock in this game. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to belabor the point, but this game just does a great job of both. You also, I mean, you can play as Alicard.

You can play as Aracado in this. Or is that in Donizaro. No, that's not as Donozo. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about are on the Wii U virtual console. And I think they look good on a TV. I wasn't disgusted by them. How much should they cost on there?

They're $7.99. Yeah, that's good for all of these. Yeah, Ariafsara, if you try to buy that as a cartridge, it's very expensive. Yes, it is. I tried to buy it for my girlfriend. Even the double pack is very expensive. Oh, wait, there was a double pack with Harmony. Is it on one cartridge? It is, yeah.

It is on one, yeah. That's the one that I have. I kind of wish I kept the original versions, but I was like, ah. How much would that cost complete these days? I think it's like, how much did you pay? Didn't you get that for Dora? Oh, I bought it from Kohler, but it was a loose cart, and I think it was like $40, right? I think it was like $70, something like that.

Just for the loose cart. Oh, my God. Are you saying Chris Kohler rep me off? He's coming in here today. It's probably a good deal. Non-pirated Game Boy Advance Games are kind of hard to come by now. They are, yeah. Oh, do we say with the Japanese title?

Isn't this like Minuit of Dawn? It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a good one. Yeah, so I think that's probably all there is to say about ARIA. I think we should take a break now and come back and talk about the DS games. Life is full of those. Life is full of those ah moments, like right of the first.

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So fill the empty space in your life until then by downloading a free audiobook and trying out the trial at audibletrial.com slash game. Welcome back. Hello, everyone. It's the second half of this podcast. Are you Boris Carl office? I think it was count von count. Count.

Do you know why they called me the count? Because I love to count. We are on the fourth game. Ah, ha, ha. Already. That's more like Adam Sandler Dragon. Sorry about that. My apologies.

And we're off of the old GBA. Yep. It's time to move on to Nintendo DS, which is where the title, Dawn of Saro, comes from. Because everyone did that gimmick, including Casabwe. How clever. Also, they had it built in. They had Aria of Saro, so it was natural for them to say, well, this is actually the second game, and it's not the dawn, but whatever. It was called Dawn of Saro.

Well, not necessarily relevant. It is important to consider he, between what we just talked about, and this one, Ega and his team did make a game called Lament of Innocence for the PlayStation 2, which will probably take, we'll include some future broadcast. So this is his return to the 2D Castlevania realm.

And his 3D Castlevania continued the trend of not being that great. But it tried. It's slightly misunderstood. It has some good, no, no. There's some stuff I like. Some of the time, yeah. But it's one that I've never gotten around to finishing because it just has a lot of

it has a good last boss. I also think we should do a micro-a-a-nano-breaker to spend that other. How much would that cost me on Patreon? Nano-breaker. If I want to do a nanobaker. Like $1,000. Like, Che-Cha still calls me nanobraker sometimes because I like it. That's what you get for calling you a T-Frog.

So anyway, we skip ahead two years from R.A.F. Saro to the dawn of sorrow. And two years brings a change in hardware. The Nintendo DS had launched in 2004, and this game actually came out right around the time that the DS started to become a serious contender. There was, you know, like the first year or so between announcement and launch and then sort of the follow-up to Nintendo dogs, everyone was like, what is this thing Nintendo is doing? And there wasn't a lot of content that proved the form factor yet. Like, why am I looking at two screens? Okay, so I can rub some rabbits. That's nice.

I mean, I got mine in the fall of 2005 because of things like Mario Kart, this, Phoenix Wright. Just all these great games were happening at once. Right. I have a soft spot for Donna Sarah because I was the voice of dissent. Maybe at Zift Davis. Voice at Descent sounds like a Castlevania game. Descent of stupidity. Yeah, so I was the voice of dissent at least at one up and maybe at Zip Davis to say, like, no, I like the DS.

I want the system to do well. You liked it at the very beginning. I did. A rest, you know, I think... Well, not quite the very beginning. Like, I talked about this on that... Super Mario 64 is not so hot on it. No.

That's a problem. It's not. When you take one of the greatest games all the time. I made some people angry by giving that like a 7.5 out of 10, but... Well, that's a little high, I think. Because, like, yeah, so I think we were wary. But everyone loved... Everyone loved this game.

I talked about this on the DS podcast, the retrospective, but... The PSP kids were so cool. When the DS came out, I was like, oh, what a weird little system. I'm going to support this and, you know, I'm going to get the dozen games that come out for it before it goes away. You bought ping pals. But then I did not do that. I didn't go that far.

But no, like after a couple, like a month after I came out, I took it with me on vacation to visit my family and my young cousins played it. And I saw them interacting with the touch and it was like, like, they just wanted to play the Mario 64 mini games. And I realized like, okay, I need to take myself out of the games press mindset because we're all a bunch of cynical jaded jerks. Kids get this. If they can make this, you know, work with the kid audience, this will go really far.

And they managed to do that. But Donosarro is the point at which, in addition to getting these kid-friendly franchises on there, these like little kind of goofy diversions, you also got really substantial follow-ups to games that we, the games press type people liked. Well, and also when you think about Castlevania, Simeon the Night and its children, one of the obvious things is, man, I like to look at that map. And, hey, the second screen, what? What a good use of the second screen.

It just it lent itself to the full. Yeah, the GBA couldn't do the overlay approach to the map that Symphony and the Night did. So you had to go to like a subscreen. But, yeah, Don of Sorrow, all of a sudden, you could just have the map on the bottom screen. And that was nice. But also, the GBA had higher resolution and a lot more hardware power than the GBA. And better sound processing, too. Yep, yep.

So all of a sudden, you had a game that wasn't quite technically on par with Symphony of the Night, but it was close. The sprites were much bigger. The music was much, much better than anything. Like, Aria had good music, but it was very constrained by the hardware. This music sounded great, great compositions, and great output. It had a much larger kind of castle. It just felt bigger, roomier, more fast-paced.

Yeah, it was great. And also, jump in, like, after the disappointment of the men of innocence, everybody was eager to return to the thing we really liked. We were eager. We were eager to return to, and they gave us what we want. You rarely get the thing you want. We got exactly the thing we want. Yeah.

I mean, the one downgrade which you listed here is the character designs, which I think is not actually reflected in the sprite art, but it is in the portrait art, and on the cover. That was the first problem. Like, one of the first things you saw was the main character image, and it was the same character, but in a much more anime, traditional, kind of generic style. Yeah, like very of the early 2000s sort of anime. For a younger audience. Yeah, and it was very definitely meant to.

be sort of like a mainstream approach. And the story was dumbed down considerably. It had like, you had more villains, but they were all just like generic anime tropes, like the guy with red hair who has a fiery temper. Like, oh, come on, really? Yeah. So the story wasn't as good, but the bonus game was great. But there was one other problem with this game, which is that it was an early

DS game. And they were like, it's not enough to have a. second screen that lets you see a map, we need to make use of touch mechanics, too. So, yeah, there's the seal of it. Yeah, shoehorned in is kind of a rudimentary, you know, trace this, you know, simple image on the bottom screen. It's a memory thing, though. You see the tracing happen, and then you have to actually replicate it without, you

know, seeing it in front of you. Right. And you can go and practice it and rehearse, but it's really frustrating because you have to collect the seals and you can't open a boss door until you have the proper seal and it'll show you the seal like the direction to draw. It's like tracing kanji basically.

Like stroke order is important. And then when you get the boss down to like a tiny fraction of its health instead of landing a death blow directly, instead the seal comes up and you have to seal the boss away by drawing on the bottom screen. Within a time limit, right? Within a time limit.

And it's no problem for the first couple of seals which have like three strokes. But at the end, doing like these really intricate, intricate, good lord, indocrine. You're doing these really indocrine, intricate seals, like pentagrams and much more complicated than that. And you have very little time. There's like a little, like little balls of fire around the rim of the seal that click down.

Yeah, every to grab the stylus, because, you know, sometimes they got more complicated. No, no, no, no. Okay, so it doesn't actually start the countdown until you touch the touch screen. So, like, it'll freeze, and you can, you know, take 10, 20 seconds to grab the stylus. Okay. But once you start drawing, then you have to complete it in time. I think I only remember failing, like, three times the entire time. Right.

But it's like the later bosses, which are really tough. Yeah. And if you don't complete the seal correctly in time, then they regenerate, like, a quarter of their health, and you have to keep fighting them. That's true. Yeah. At least you don't have to blow into the DS. I've always hated that.

Nintendo kept doing it as late as Spear tracks and things like that. It's awful. Yeah. There is that. But so those two problems, the anime art style and the seals, are really the only complaints I have about this game. Otherwise, it takes the Aria of Saro's style and mechanics and makes it, like, you know, blows it up from PS, or from GBA quality to PS1 quality. And specifically, the mechanic of the soul system is greatly enhanced by allowing you to power up some of the souls by collecting multiple souls. Pretty much all of them.

You can just keep grinding for souls and make them stronger. I remember just some of them have much more different visual effects. Like we brought up the curry skeleton. And in this one, when you max out the curry skeleton, you feel like this giant. Yeah, it's like a whole tray. It's a whole tray of food. Yeah. So none of this is mandatory.

You don't have to power up any of the souls, but you can. There's also the ability to sacrifice some of your souls to power up your weapons. And there are some kind of hard to come by one-time souls that you can change. choose to bond into a weapon, but if you do that, then you won't be able to use that soul again. So there's a, there's a real tradeoff and you can't be a completeist without, you know, doing the new game plus. And I'm okay with that. Like, it's interesting.

It forces you to make, you know, to make decisions. It's not just like a cruise through and collect everything like Symphony of the Night was. Like, there are some tradeoffs and some decisions you have to make. So it's, it's pretty interesting. And the castle itself, I think, is much more memorable. The areas are much more distinct than they were in Aria. you have like the big cathedral area you have like a crazy underground lab

which has really unusual like kind of funky rock music that's not typical to Castlevania and the very last part of this game is spectacular did you remember the end game like the last levels of this game where you go into the void

yes yeah yeah I think it's possibly my favorite level talk about it well it's been so long as I played it but I just remember being hellish and abstract and strange and like going places, like almost like an evangelicalian kind of place, you know, like really going surreal in a way that Castlevania had not gone previously. Right. And in this game, you don't fight Dracula at the end, because you are Dracula. Instead, you fight chaos, which is like three screens high.

Right. And doesn't it, like, steal some of your souls away? Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of reminds me of the Final Fantasy Eight final battle where you're, like, losing your abilities and you have to, you know, compensate for that. Yeah. I just felt like Egan and his team threw everything. They really decided to, like, go all out in a way that everyone wanted.

And this game is like, you know, if you were a fan of Symphony and Ariavsarro, this is like, you know, the end of that trilogy almost. Right. And people are, like, complaining about recycled sprites. No, this game does so much. It's okay. Let them reuse some assets. It's fine. Look at all the other things this game does.

There's so much. And then if you get the bad ending, it's so good. because, yes, Soma becomes Dracula, but you don't just play as Julius. You play, like, non-linear Castlevania 3, where you play as Julius and Yoko and Al U-Card. And I think they were originally planning to make Hammer play like Grant. And Yon, you cut that out. And Yoko has, like, Sifa's power. Yoko is Saiva.

Yeah. And having to play AlarCard again is just fantastic as well. It really over-delivers on the end-game content. It's so good. Yeah, that bonus stage, it's really. worth getting the bad ending just because that's so well done. It's such a love letter to cast me. So the GPA games are on virtual console for the Wii, but none of the DS games are.

Are these rare? I just, I want to play this again, but I have a feeling it's hard to come by. Really? Okay. I think this had like a greatest hit. Really, really, even. In America and Japan. The game box art inside the game box art.

It's like an inception. It's like a box in the box. Exactly. This is in, you know, I often think about like if I combine ARIA and this into one experience, it's definitely my favorite castle. I think these sold well enough that they're not super. rare. Now, I know Order of Ecclesia is not, it's not an expensive game, which I thought would be

because it's so late in their lifestyle. Portrait is going up, I believe. Is it? I mean, these are going to get expensive at some point. This is the one I don't have. But the DS market hasn't quite taken off yet. Yeah. You should get this. I'm buying low right now. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they're worth having. Do you have them? I have everyone but this one. Okay. So good. Have you played it before?

Oh, yeah. I beat it when it came out. So God, I want to go back to it now. It's the one I didn't play for this show. Yeah. So I agree with you, Shane. This does feel like, sort of the culmination of a trilogy. And the two games that followed after this were both very different in a lot of ways. Yeah, I felt like he didn't want to repeat himself again, so he actually did some new things

and some successes and failures we'll talk about. So, yeah, the next year, can you believe these games came out once a year? How spoiled were we? Oh, my God. And this is where I was like, I'm okay with Castlevania for now. I'll just put you aside and I didn't realize it would no longer be annual. And I'll say, when we get to portrait, it is, even though

it's very different, when things reappear from previous games, this is when, as reviewers we started to bemoan like, well, I like this boss, but I sure fought him a lot of times. Yeah, Frankenstein is back baby. Yeah, but every time it was different. Oh, anyway. So Portrait of Ruin is the next game. And this game, it doesn't

set the series forward, but it doesn't go way back into the past either. It's set in the 20th century right after World War II. So Iga wanted to kind of revisit bloodlines with this game. And he did. And he did. Literally. Yeah, and it kind of, you know, of the time and the characters are different. It has that different feel

than the previous three games. Yeah, I mean, if Symphony of the Night was a sequel to Rondo of Blood, this is the sequel to Bloodlines. And it doesn't, it's not obvious at first, but the more you play, the more the plot elements come in. Yeah, and it's interesting because you remember Bloodlines had two different protagonists back in the day,

two characters, and also this is the game where like kind of the zeitgeist at the moment was multiplayer. So there's a little bit of that kind of injected. A little bit. A little bit. Limited, yeah. Into this game. But also, like, you know, Bloodlines, the point was to travel across Europe to all of Castlevania or all of Dracula's different layers.

And this game, even though it has like a central castle that you're exploring, you journey out into other places. So it really does kind of capture that sense of like, you know, traveling around the world. Right. Although in this case, you're not literally traveling around the world. You're traveling into paintings. So it's kind of like Mario 64. Yeah.

But I remember some of the earliest stuff we saw was like kind of Egyptian theme, and that seemed really fresh, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So they did try to do a lot with this. You can kind of see the budget limitations coming in in the second half where four more portraits appear and you have to fight through them and they're just like variants of the first four portraits. But I remember you do fight the first bosses of Castlevania remade there, which is kind of cool. You know, it's like that there's some fan service.

Yeah, but you did that in Symphony the night too. That's true, yeah. So I think it's fair to say that they were kind of struggling for some inspiration and working against their budget limitations. But there is also a lot to love about portrait of ruin. It's an even better looking game than Dawn of Sorrow. There's more 3D elements in the backgrounds I remember. It's new kind of environments, and they're all done really beautifully. Like the village that you go through, you have like all these shops and stuff,

and they're just loaded with details. And, you know, there's crazy little elements you can play with. Like, you jump up on these platforms that are, you know, like pantry shelves, and little things fall off because you're knocking them loose. and you can go into a butcher shop and beat up the pieces of meat hanging. There's just lots of little details. But the most important

element of this game, the thing that makes it distinct is that you're playing as two characters. There's Jonathan he plays like a Belmont. He might have... His name, is he Jonathan Morris? I think maybe he is. So it's getting that Morris Baldwin thing again. He's kind of a more traditional Belmont style character. Right. He is

very much a Belmont. He's like not a Belmont directly, but he's like a cousin of the family. Yeah. And then there's the young lady, Charlotte. Charlotte Allen.

And I think that's where most of the ingenuity is in her gameplay and how you use the two characters as a single player to solve puzzles. Right. Yeah. Early in the game,

you gain the ability to call in a second character and have them fight along with you as an AI controlled character. So you get like Charlotte who fights with a very weak melee attack but has a ton of magic spells. Yeah, like things pop out of a book, right?

If she gets hurt, if the other thing gets hurt, does it cost you like magic points? There's something, there's some penalty. There's like a weapon or an item you can equip. You do lose magic points if your character, the second character is hurt, but you can change it so you lose health instead. But it's something useful on bosses. I remember it was a cool mechanic.

Yeah. So learning to use each character in the right context and learning when you need to use them together, when you need to use them separately just one character at a time, that all becomes really important. Like one of the most clever elements of the game, there's a few enemies in the game. that interact differently with the characters. There's the kind of like the fat guy and the pantalones in the lost village early on. And if he sees Jonathan, he'll attack.

But if he sees Charlotte, then he drops to one knee and offers her a rose, and he's completely defenseless. Like, he won't attack Charlotte. And there's a killer. And there's an email villain, too, yeah. There's a boss, yes. I put her name down. Astarte.

She's the Egyptian goddess. You have to get Jonathan out of there because she has a magic spell that will charm Jonathan and cause him to go berserk and fight for her. So if you're playing as Jonathan, you lose complete control. If you're playing a Charlotte with Jonathan in the background, then Jonathan starts attacking you and you will basically lose because he's really powerful. So you have to fight this goddess, this Egyptian goddess, solo as Charlotte.

Otherwise, it's really difficult. And the secret of unlocking the true ending to the game also revolves around learning, knowing which character to use. and basically you have to be Charlotte and you have to cast this really powerful magic spell that takes a long time to cast. So you need Jonathan to run around behind you as an AI and sort of back you up and defend you. So they do a really good job of

kind of making you change up how you play and the approach you take to these two characters. So that part I think works really, really well. There was less customization of the characters, though, than we'd seen it, Aria and Don. think for me it did feel like a step back or like a simplification on purpose kind of? Yeah, I mean

you know, because you had two characters like it kind of divided up their their customization. But I mean, Jonathan could equip all kinds of weapons. You know, ultimately he has to learn to use the vampire killer whip. Right. And there's a pretty cool like cutscene or not cutscene but set piece battle

that you have to do to do that. Well, and her abilities were so creative. I remember one like she would like summon Don Quixote to come out of her book. You know, like Yeah. Jonathan has a ton of sub-weapons he can acquire. Like, he can use all the different kind of weapon styles that Alucard can in addition to the whip. But you also have tons and tons of sub-weapons.

Like, I think there's like 30. So in addition to, you know, the Holy Water and the axe, you can also get really goofy things like paper airplanes. And, you know, you can throw the curry from the waiter skull in it and so forth. And each of these abilities you collect, the more you use them, the more powerful they become. So each of them has its own. like experience tracking system. So the more you use one, the more powerful it becomes. But it's not

too hard to max them out. So it behooves you to switch things around, especially if you want to do the completion of style and just get 100% on everything. So there are a lot of play opportunities in this game and a lot of customization, a lot of incentive to vary up how you play.

You know, despite the breadth of the game where you're like going to these different places, it does feel a little shorter though, remember? It doesn't feel like a huge adventure, and the first half of the game has more new creative content than the back half of the game, too. By the time you fight Legion, you're like, what's he doing here?

The back half is very much like the second castle of Symphony of the Night. It's the first half of the game sort of remixed. And that's okay. Like, it's still a pretty substantial game. Did Igarashi ever make any statements about the development of this game and any kind of compromises

that had to be made? I'm just curious if he's spoken on the record about it. I don't think so. Back in the day, you know, he was trying some new things. he was very excited to go back to, like, yeah, the Genesis Cassania style, and the interplay of the two characters. And the multiplayer, I don't really remember it, but there was a local... Sort of like the boss rush mode, that was multiplayer. You can do, like, a shop where you can sell things to people.

Yeah, but it felt tacked on. Yeah. Yeah, I remember... I didn't care. I think there was resources wasted on the multiplayer, potentially. But, you know, I did like this game, but, you know, coming from Don of Sorrow, it was kind of the inevitable slight letdown. Well, I appreciate the fact that they...

dropped the touchscreen element of Don of Sorrow until you get to the bonus mode. Right. You can, you know, as with every Castlevania developed by Igarashi, you can play, you know, once you beat the game as a second character. In this case, you're playing as the two sisters who are like dimmy vampires who you fight. And they turn out, it turns out that they're the daughters of one of the characters from Bloodlines, who is sort of a ghost who's been killed in Dracula's Castle who helps guide you long. But you can play as the

sisters, and they control entirely by the stylus, and it's really cool because they, like, they, you know, they're vampires, so they float, so you control them based on, you know, flying around, and you can one of them has like a projectile attack, and the other, like, uses

telekinesis, basically. So you can, like, do all these crazy physics things with, with enemies that you didn't even know existed. Like, you know, I blogged once about how I made a little game out of trying to see how much distance I could get out of zombies like that's a half and like their upper

halves would go flying. That was fun. I kind of forgot about that. That was interesting, unlockable for sure. Yeah, yeah. So they definitely put a lot of love into this game. Was this the one that the soundtrack was not by Yamane or was the next one? One of them is the next one. It's the next one. Okay. This one was actually matured Yamane and also Yuzzo Khashiro.

Right, okay. This got some great Kashiro dance. It's good remixes of old stuff too. Yes. This was the 20th anniversary. They released that box set, that really huge box set of Castlevania music too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. I just remember at the time I was playing this, I just run into three game flight and play for a long, but I did

remember annoying my girlfriend at the time when you switch characters, they say the other one's name. So I was like, Jonathan, Charlie. So it's doing that back and forth until she'd be like, shut up. So that's my main memory of this game. I need to go back and revisit it. I played it a little bit for this, but the next game is one, I just feel everyone is down about, I don't even know if I want to play

it. No, Nick. So while preparing for this. I really want to beat this game. So, while preparing for this podcast, this was the one that I kind of remember the least because it was the last one, but then as I was like looking at... That doesn't make any sense. It's the last recent one. I know, but like it feels like a long time, I don't know, for whatever reason.

And that goes towards the end of my editorial career when I reviewed this. And a lot has happened since this in the world of Metroedvanias, as we kind of talked about. So like, while revisiting it, I was like, oh man, this one in many ways has some of the best moments of any Eganian. Some of the boss battles. Like the first major

boss battle in this game is so good. So very, very good. So much more dramatic and kind of directed, like, there was, he brought a different perspective to this game, but he also pared it down considerably. And in many ways, because I'm a Simon's Quest fan, I feel like this one is kind of a weird spiritual successor to Simon's Quest. Yeah, all of Egos games kind of touch back on an older Castlevania, and this one very much was Simon's Quest. There's a village and you're basically going on quests to refine the people who have been kidnapped from the

village and bring them back. And so that kind of becomes your central hub. And And everything is connected by a map that looks exactly like the Castlevania 2 map and Nintendo Power, like, 100%. It's crazy. And the fact that that map exists and, you know, it's kind of weird because, like, a Metroidvania has always been about this, you know, kind of coherent, diagetic world that's all interconnected. And suddenly there's, like, this weird map in front of you after all these games. But it does show you that you're going to go to these different places and that some of the levels are very small compared to what you're going to expect. So it's, you know, some of that were just like a pass-through almost. Yeah, it kind of mixes up the formula. And you don't, as a traditional Castlevania fan, you don't know what to expect.

And also... But they kind of built on Portrait of Ruin, which, you know, gave you the castle as a central hub, but then gave you eight levels that were self-contained. Right. And I think one of the criticisms of hardcore Castlevania fans through these five games had been, they seem to be getting easier and easier and easier. And this game is hard. It's hard as balls. Like, it takes away many of the things you're used to being able to kind of just farm and have infinite life. And actually, and the bosses in general are new and deviant.

Reading reviews about this game, it seems the difficulty was just inflated hip points. Really, there was sort of just a not very creative way to add difficulty to a game. Just sort of infleating hip points. The boss battles are very long. Yeah. Incredibly long. Well, I mean, part of it there is an attribute system to your souls. You don't have physical weapons.

The glyph system. Yeah, the glyph system, which is very much like the tactical soul system. This is the first castamian in a very long time with the female protagonist. It's true. Only. Only, yeah. Shanoa. It doesn't have any Belmonts in it.

all kind of like this order of Ecclesia, the people who have like sworn to take on Dracula on their own terms without, you know, using the Belmont's enchantments. And it's clearly less whimsical, less fanciful than the previous four games. Yeah, it has, it has, it goes back away from the anime character portrait style to, it's not, it's not a yami koujima. It's a different female artist, and it's quite good. It's very nice. And it's by far the best-looking Castlevania game, period.

Like the backgrounds Oh my God They're so beautiful And Shanoa's animation is so good And I'm skipping out But they kind of gave us New Sprites

It's like Oh my God A new Medusa Sprite Holy hell Yeah there's a lot of new stuff It really does feel like Sort of the culmination of Castlevania

But it is very difficult Because your glyph system Your glyphs have attributes So like there's piercing There's crushing You know what this game is Vagrant Story Castania A little bit

I mean it's you know Like traditional RPG Like, RPGs have those attributes. If you don't have the right attribute, you're fighting a boss, you're doing one point of damage. Yeah, basically. And even against normal enemies. Like, when you first, I've been replaying a little bit. And when you first get the Massis glyph, which is a hammer, like, that's great against

skeletons. All of a sudden, you're doing 50% more damage against skeletons. But there's these, like, horrible little things that fly around in the woods and will swoop down and grab you and suck your life away. And if you try to hit them with a hammer, you do, like, two hit points of damage, whereas the stabbing attack does, like, 15. So you really have to know which glyphs to use. Yeah, there's more strategy, more preparation.

But even with the right glyphs, it can be really tedious. The bosses, like, I get what they were trying to do, but it kind of reminds me of the last battle of Circle the Moon, where it's just a battle of attrition. And you have to keep doing the right thing over and over again. It's such a grind. I think a lot of people were so discouraged about how difficult it was. They didn't actually get to the back half of the game, which is Castlevania.

I mean, there's this amazing... I've never been there. Oh, you're missing out. I know. I've heard it's great. There's this cut scene of like, you know, Shanoa, like, arriving at Castlevania. And then, like, when you get there,

it is the first level of California and you really, you really want it. You've earned it, you know? No, I mean, I want to love this game. I swear to God, I'm going to finish it. God, they should be an HD remake or something. How do you read? I don't know.

I think part of what makes it great is that it is that 2D-16-bit-looking, like, you know, PlayStation-era hand-hand-drawn art. It's just such great colors, There's such great detail everywhere. I mean, it's, you know, Ecclesia itself is like this sort of like a cathedral almost. And everything is just so ornate and detailed. It's very, you know, like medieval Baroque. I love it.

It's such a great-looking game. I think this game was a little misunderstood at the time. And I know a lot of people who didn't finish it like you. And I think it's ripe for reappraisal. Yeah, I don't dislike it. I want to love it. And it really, really pushes me away. But I'm determined.

I swear to God, by the time it turns 10, I'm going to have finished it. That's next year or so. Yeah, I mean, were the sales poor? Were they just not what they wanted them to be? I'm just curious as to why this would be the final. I think the DS market at this point had turned into like dump-ins. Yeah. There were just so many games.

Yeah. Yeah. This came out right before the big 2009 glut. Right. 2009 was also the year that the iPhone started playing games. I forgot. Yeah. So that was just bad news.

So this was basically the end of Castlevania. There were a couple of games after. There was Harmony of Despair, the multiplayer online, which is interesting and fun, but it's not a new Castlevania. And if you're like recycled sprites, wait until you see them blown up to fill your entire screen. Yes. You can cut yourself on those. I mean, basically, and there was also Castlevania Judgment. So like everything.

And there's also the interesting one for Wii Wear. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, rebirth. Which is good. It's okay. It's worth playing. But yeah, this was definitely a period of Igarashi trying really hard to do a lot with very little money. Konami was not giving him a lot of money for projects, which is why you get stuff

like judgment. Well, and also, like, these games were selling a few tens of thousand copies in Japan, but a ton of copies in the West, you know, in Europe and South America and North America. And you think about it now, in retrospect, it was the salad days of Castlevania. We had six, you know, five really great Californias in, like, a short amount of time. You know, it was pretty amazing. We mentioned judgment and passing. It was a wee fighting game, correct?

It was. We'll talk about that in, like, the Castlevania Bastards. I just wanted to point that out. That happened. That actually happens. Hard by Death Note guy, developed by A-Ting. It's been its best left forgotten, really, though. 8-4 did it, though, right?

They did. They did. Yeah, they did. They did their best. They only localized it. They didn't make the game. Right. Their hands are clean.

But yeah, this is basically the end of true Castlevania at this point. And so now Igarashi has left Konami because that plays as a shit show. And he's making his own successor to Castlevania, bloodstained ritual of the night, which is, I mean, I played it last year at E3. and it is, it's basically like the follow-on to order of Ecclesia. It feels like Castlevania. I have the demo that they release for backers. It feels like Castlevania. And I think already looks a lot more encouraging than my number nine.

And they're pushing it back to 2018 for the best. Instead of just rushing it out this year. Yeah. Which I'm fine with. I can wait another year for a great Castlevania game. We waited this long. Yeah. I mean, was I-Garashi, the only thing he worked on that was released in this period?

Was that lead-mees? Was that the only thing he actually produced between this and leaving Konami? He did the Perodeus for Xbox 360. Oh, okay. That was, like, his game. Otomadius? Otomadius. It's quite good.

Well, it's good. And he helped out with some other projects. He did some mobile stuff. But I think in a related time for this era, too, like, you know, just to touch on, I think, you know, Metroid's zero mission and Metroid of this. We're also, you know, similar in quality to these games of on the same time. And then we never got a DS Metroid. Right. In, like, the real.

Of this era. And I think it wasn't until many years later with games such as Axiom Verge, Guacamayle, you know, where we saw things of this quality again in this genre. Yeah, I think the next Castlevania-esque game that we can look forward to is chasm, which has been in development for a long time. Another good word, Aletlisia. It's a little more like Popplemail, but it's also quite good.

I backed both of those on Kickstarter. But yeah, so now this genre has been embraced by the Indies, by people of our generation and younger, who know what's great about these games and can spend time working on a passion project. So in a way, I feel like all the evangelism I did at one-up finally paid off. Right. Yeah, I feel like Ego ultimately gave this amazing genre

to the fans and as a fan himself it's like I could you know I think we're everyone's better off of this this All right, so that wraps it up for our discussion. I do have some reader mail. Before we get that, I went at one thing. When I was listening to your episode about Rondo Blood, there was a lot of question about that game's director

and how this game came to be. And you mentioned his name is Toru Hagiwara. It looks like Hagi Hara, but you actually say O'Wara. Do you? I got to meet him. And I brought with me my copy of Rhonda Blood, autographed by him, which is like one of my most precious objects of all time. Don't take that out of its seal.

It's an durable bag. No, I'll take it out of the steel. No, I'll do it. I don't know, because there's something else under it, but I got to meet him, and they took me to his office, and he was, like, way high up at this point. He wasn't working on games anymore. Yeah, I wouldn't think so.

And I asked him to autograph this, and he was like, he couldn't believe that I knew who he was and that I had this game. And he's like, but if I write on it, it won't be worth any money. Oh. It's what he's told me. You said, I don't care, right. Yeah, so I'm really proud to have that. That's cool.

And it's my favorite thing. What does Panzer Dragoon have to do with anything? This one, you were asking if the cover, on your episode, about the data disks release of Panzer against soundtrack, you're asking if the Japanese cover was in fact drawn by Jean Girard Mobius and it is and I owe this amazing autographed copy to my friend James Moki who waited patiently to get this as he has many things. He's awesome. All right. Well, there you go. So a few listener mail, I guess, is what we would call it. From Seth Macy. I have all three of the DS Castlevania games, but I've only played Donna Sorrow to completion. Seth, get on that. I've only played. I've only played. Well, and he played them out of order. Yeah, yeah, man.

Got to go back. Donisar is the only game other than Donkey Kong 64 I've ever played to 100% completion. Oh, that's a... I have weird tastes. You like to collect objects. In the brightest and most optimistic corners of my heart, I hope Nintendo's Switch will help kickstart a new generation of side-scrolling portable Castlevania games, but the realistic corners of my heart where the blood is

knows it definitely won't happen. Maybe bloodstain will make its way to switch. Doesn't Bomberman R give you a little bit of hope, Jeremy? Uh, no. especially not at 50 pounds sterling Yeah So from Adam Adland The handheld Casabinias definitely peaked with Aria and Don of Sorrow

Circle of Moon was okay It was nearly unplayable until the G.B player Harmony of Dissonance built from this groundwork And return to the series canon But almost felt like they were overcompensating for the falls of circle And what was up with Juiced? He's good hair The anime art direction of Don precipitated the series downturn

the hauntingly beautiful artwork of Ayami Kojima cannot be replaced. Porta de Ruyn, while All Right, definitely had a lot of half-baked gameplay ideas, and the Saturday morning anime aesthetic wasn't doing it any favor. Despite that, Charlotte Olin is one of my favorite protagonists for the series. The gameplay and subtle animations for the character were really fun. He mostly agrees with us.

And Order of Ecclesia is the only handheld entry I didn't finish. Shout out. That's most people's. From Mars Dragon. I'm a big fan of Castlevania who got into the series right around 2001, so the handheld entries all have a special place in my life. my heart. I traded advance wars for Circle of the Moon, freshman year of high school, and considered myself to have come out ahead. I no longer think this, but I still have a weird

fondness for Circle. I think all the handheld Metrovanias have something to recommend them, something that stands out to the point where I wouldn't call any of them bad games per se. Because of Lovina got me through high school and college and I still love the series today. Just don't ask about Lords of Shadow. Oh, God, I guess there was... We're not going to talk about it. Oh, man. Near a fate. Oh, let's not talk about that. Those don't belong on this podcast. Dark days. I think that was... The last scored review I wrote for OneUp.com and it was a C-C-minus? I consider that franchise by its original IP, not the one that it inherited.

Yeah. For Michael Mariano, I missed most of Castlevania's portable run, coming in only for Order of a Cleggia. Interesting. I had debated going back and playing previous games, but the sprites seemed smaller. The playthrough looked slower. It didn't seem like there was any compelling reason to go back. You're wrong. So, Michael, man, you are in for a treat.

You're in for some of the best Castlevania games ever made. Some of the best games. They're great stuff. John Lernet has fiery Castlevania opinions. John Lennon? John Lerned. These are the most important opinions, he says. Circle the Moon, not as bad as most remember.

Don of Sorrow, not as good as most remember. Order of Ecclesia has nice art. Man. You are banned from listening to Retronaut. Let's set fire to that guy. For three months. User error. Two more.

I'm glad that wasn't John Lennon. So from Dan Fight The handheld Castlevania games that I know, Dan, did we know Dan Fight? We do. I know all these people that are ready. Really? Jeremy Parrish says, I love Jeremy Parrish.

All the handheld Castlevania games that Ica produced were at the forefront of the modern retro movement and instrumental in bringing me back to video games. In the early 2000s, there was still a strong push for 3D everything. Classic series, after classic series, was being dragged, kicking and screaming from their 2D roots

into untested 3D waters. In Castlevania's case, this resulted in a series of big-budget polygonal affairs that no one remembers. Meanwhile, in the GBA and DS, Ego was making games brimming with sprite art that could be enjoyed for hours and replayed for extra goodies.

Sure, the handheld Igavannias were derivative of symphony of the night, but at a time when the rush to 3D made me think video games weren't for me anymore, the Egovenius had everything I wanted from a game. Maybe this was intentional, maybe it was a happy accident, but those games felt like they were really made for me. Nicely put, Dan.

P.S. I know Order of Ecclesia is super hard, but Shanoa is great. And if you don't believe me, ask my daughter, Shanoa. Wow. All right. One last. Actually, no.

My throat is killing me. So everyone who wrote it about Castlevania and whose messages I didn't read, we're going to do another Castlevania podcast. We're going to do just an episode of letters. Anyway, we are running a little bit long. That does wrap it up for... And I'm going to plug before I go. I need to plug some stuff.

Give me at least 30 seconds. Right. Buy Sony games. So this wraps it up for the Castlevania Portable. episode of Retronauts. Thanks to everyone for listening. I'm Jeremy Parrish with Bob Mackie, Shane Bettenhausen. We are Retronauts. And you can find us at Retronauts.com on iTunes. And you can support us on Patreon. Please do, because that's how I'm making my living now. This is the first recording session we've done now that Castlevania is a full-time venture for me.

Wait, Castlevania is a full-time venture? Yes. Castlevania, I mean, Retronauts. It's all the save in my heart. There's not a lot of money in that journey. It's all the same in my heart now. So anyway, you can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, around about, on Patreon, where Retronauts also GameSpite, where I'm doing chronological videos that are part of the Retronauts family now. It's all good. It's awesome. I think we might have ads in this episode because we also are supporting ourselves that way. So please enjoy those, I hope. We officially sold out. Yep. Yep. But, you know, I got to buy baby new shoes. There you go.

You've got Humphrey, D.S. Mouths to feed. Are there, oh, I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. Bob, why don't you tell us about yourself? Sure. Again, that Patreon is patreon.com slash Retronauts. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also write for fandom.com and something awful.com. And my other podcast is Talking Simpsons.

It's a chronological exploration of The Simpsons every Wednesday, a new episode in order. We are currently probably at the beginning of season 5, I'm guessing by the time this podcast post. But if you like The Simpsons, you like the podcast, go to Talking Simpsons. Simpsons.com, or search for Talking Simpsons in your podcast device, and you'll find it. Thank you, Shane. And I like that now the free Talking Simpsons are actually good episodes of Simpsons, not like, you know, the first season of Simpsons. Well, the first season is behind a paywall, so we won't subject you to that.

Exactly. Oh, do you listen, Shane? I'm a fan. Oh, wow. Tell us about yourself. So, thanks for having me back on. I love the Retronauts. You can find me on Twitter at Shane Watch, all one word.

My day job is at PlayStation, where I have an account manager for lots of cool digital publishers, and just to pitch some things that my guys are coming up soon. are relevant to this podcast in the next one, I don't know when this comes out. But in the spring, you'll be able to purchase on PS4 Invita East Origin, which is rad. It's like a thing that makes me very happy. Windjammers, as well as full throttle remastered. So those are kind of relevant. And also, Hamster has all these cool, cool, classic games always come out.

So check out the Hamster Arcade Archives and the ACA NeoGeo Arcade Archives. Please put Shadow Hearts on PSN. Man, who has it now? Midway stuff all got split up. I wish we could figure out. Every game has a different publisher. I know. Yeah, because those three would be amazing.

I've been trying to figure out who has that. It's like H-Tek, Midway, and X-Eed, one, two, and three. Yeah, okay, I'm going to try to figure it. Those aren't my guys, but I'll do what I can. If not your band. But, yeah. So anyway, is that everything? That's everything.

And, yeah, please feel free to invite me back in the future. I love doing this podcast. Okay, we will invite you back for sure. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, thanks everyone for listening. We are a weekly podcast now. So join us next week for a full episode because that's what we do. Thanks again.

We're going to be able to be. Hello, podcast listening friends. It is I, Jeremy Parrish, co-host of Retronauts, and I'm here to share the good word of Midwestronauts. That's right, both Bob Mackey and I will be taking a break from our lives as coastal elites to return to our Midwestern origins. We'll be going to Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee.

Join us on Saturday, April 8th at 3 p.m. for our next live presentation. A look back at Namco's Splatterhouse franchise. We'll be joined by Caitlin Oliver and Kevin bunch, two experts in the games, and by experts, I mean, world-class high-score competitors. It doesn't get more expert than that. So if you're in the neighborhood, come on out to Milwaukee and Midwest Gaming Classic. Experience the magic live. It'll be splatterific. Life is full of those ah moments, like right up to the first stretch and yaw in the morning.

Or like standing in the forest alone amid the stillness, the beauty hits you like. the crisp air, and suddenly everything makes sense, and you're one with the earth and stars. Or like dollar drinks at McDonald's. Keep those awe moments going with $1 any-sized McAfee-Brewed coffee and $1-0. Any-Sized soft drinks on the $1-2-3 menu. Pricing participation may vary, cannot be combined with combo meal. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week. when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today.

at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.