This journal sucks and is now about Castlevania
I just got started on Order of Ecclesia, and I think it looks pretty good so far. The character portraits are pretty well drawn, and the controls are a lot better than the ones in Portrait of Ruins. I'll comment more after I've spent some more time with it. Meaning, at least until I've beaten the first boss. I just thought I'd mention this now since the rest of the entry is about Castlevania games.
I hate Portrait of Ruin. Maybe it's not fair because I only played like half an hour of it, but I can't bring myself to play any further. The main character, with any weapon that's available to him around the portion of the game that I played, takes about two seconds to swing a weapon. You can get around this by having his Wonder Twin use magic in conjunction with his physical attacks, okay fine. Still, even at the start of the game it takes about two or three rounds of these attack/magic combinations to defeat a single enemy, and it gets kind of tedious.
And then you get to the first portrait world. Supposedly there's a lot of these portrait world scattered throughout the game, and the first room you start off in is alll the way on the left side of the little mini-map that takes up the top screen of the DS. Which kind of implies the portrait world must be pretty damn big. Which kind of implies the whole game castle must be pretty damn big. Which is pretty awesome, right?
Except after getting halfway to where the boss is, you start noticing that you've passed the same room like four or five times. Yeah, the portrait world basically reuses not only the same backgrounds, but also the same rooms over and over again. And the whole time, you're running into the same ensemble of enemies, each of which take about two or three rounds of attack/magic to kill. By the time I reached the boss of that area I was pretty sick of the game in general.
And then the first side quest, which you have to take in order to get your next special power. You have to go back into the portrait world, find the "butcher shop", and smack a piece of meat a few times. So where's the butcher shop? Well, it turns out to be one of those room clones that happens to have a piece of meat hanging in the middle of it. It's kind of in an out-of-the-way place so you might pass through the portrait world without even finding that room in the first place, and even if you did, there wasn't anything particularly memorable about that room or anything that suggests that it's a butcher shop other than that piece of meat hanging in the middle of the room, which might easily be misconstrued as something else. I shut off the game around that point and never touched it again.
And that's my rant on Portrait of Ruin. I don't particularly hate any of the other Castlevania games. I also don't there's a single Castletroid game that's better designed than Super Metroid.
Metroid is like a toy box. Every room is different and has something interesting in it for you to do, and sometimes, you go back to a room you've visited before and notice something else about it, like a hidden power-up that you couldn't reach before. "Castletroid" games want to be like a toy box, but they're really more like a chore. It also presents rewards for you if you go back and explore earlier areas of the game, but lately most of these rewards have been in the form of weapons and armor that are probably already useless to you by the time you can reach them.
In a way, it feels like they tried to take the original linear Castlevania games and tried to fit it into a Metroid-like form. Except in the original games every room rewarded you for visiting it (by letting you go ahead to the next room). In Castletroid games, that's not really much of a reward anymore, so they try to reward you with weapons.
The only other reasons you might go back to earlier rooms might be to grind monsters for exp or gold or items (or souls, as in the case of the Sorrow games), which should already throw out warning lights at you for the simple reason that "grinding" is involved. In Dawn of Sorrow, you are no longer capable of finding any kind of useful equipment in the dungeon and can only get the ultimate weapons by collecting the required souls and then upgrading them. Well, one of the souls necessary for upgrading your greatsword is the Valkyrie soul, right? What I wound up doing was I went and found a room with just a Valkyrie in it, and just killed it over and over again. It wasn't fun, it was a chore. If you have enough MP, you can kill the Valkyrie within two seconds of entering the room. If not, the Valkyrie might stupidly try to stab at you in the air, but it will never NEVER hit you, because it couldn't figure out what most grade schoolers have figured out while playing Space Invaders. In this case, the Valkyrie soul is considered rare, so I spent about five hours grinding for that soul. This is with my character's "Luck" stat boosted in every way possible. I didn't spend five consecutive hours doing this. I did it on nights where I couldn't get to sleep, and killing Valkyries over and over again kind of had a hypnotizing effect to it. And after five of those hours, I finally got rewarded for my efforts, right? No, I gave up. Grinding for souls was pointless, because you don't need any of those overpowered swords to beat the game. Going back and hunting for treasure is useless too, because the treasure is worthless. So that whole game becomes kind of a task, where you try to get from point A to point F as quickly as possible.
None of the Metroid games involved any kind of grinding whatsoever. If you felt like you needed more health or missiles to defeat a boss, you didn't go back to a single room to fight the same group of enemies over and over again. You retrace your steps over the whole "castle" to look for any power-ups you might have missed. This is a much better system than grinding for exp. After that huge paragraph about how Castlevania's grinding sucks you'd expect me to write an equally long paragraph about Metroid, right? But no, this is all I have to say, unfortunately. I'm a fighter, not a lover.
I hate Portrait of Ruin. Maybe it's not fair because I only played like half an hour of it, but I can't bring myself to play any further. The main character, with any weapon that's available to him around the portion of the game that I played, takes about two seconds to swing a weapon. You can get around this by having his Wonder Twin use magic in conjunction with his physical attacks, okay fine. Still, even at the start of the game it takes about two or three rounds of these attack/magic combinations to defeat a single enemy, and it gets kind of tedious.
And then you get to the first portrait world. Supposedly there's a lot of these portrait world scattered throughout the game, and the first room you start off in is alll the way on the left side of the little mini-map that takes up the top screen of the DS. Which kind of implies the portrait world must be pretty damn big. Which kind of implies the whole game castle must be pretty damn big. Which is pretty awesome, right?
Except after getting halfway to where the boss is, you start noticing that you've passed the same room like four or five times. Yeah, the portrait world basically reuses not only the same backgrounds, but also the same rooms over and over again. And the whole time, you're running into the same ensemble of enemies, each of which take about two or three rounds of attack/magic to kill. By the time I reached the boss of that area I was pretty sick of the game in general.
And then the first side quest, which you have to take in order to get your next special power. You have to go back into the portrait world, find the "butcher shop", and smack a piece of meat a few times. So where's the butcher shop? Well, it turns out to be one of those room clones that happens to have a piece of meat hanging in the middle of it. It's kind of in an out-of-the-way place so you might pass through the portrait world without even finding that room in the first place, and even if you did, there wasn't anything particularly memorable about that room or anything that suggests that it's a butcher shop other than that piece of meat hanging in the middle of the room, which might easily be misconstrued as something else. I shut off the game around that point and never touched it again.
And that's my rant on Portrait of Ruin. I don't particularly hate any of the other Castlevania games. I also don't there's a single Castletroid game that's better designed than Super Metroid.
Metroid is like a toy box. Every room is different and has something interesting in it for you to do, and sometimes, you go back to a room you've visited before and notice something else about it, like a hidden power-up that you couldn't reach before. "Castletroid" games want to be like a toy box, but they're really more like a chore. It also presents rewards for you if you go back and explore earlier areas of the game, but lately most of these rewards have been in the form of weapons and armor that are probably already useless to you by the time you can reach them.
In a way, it feels like they tried to take the original linear Castlevania games and tried to fit it into a Metroid-like form. Except in the original games every room rewarded you for visiting it (by letting you go ahead to the next room). In Castletroid games, that's not really much of a reward anymore, so they try to reward you with weapons.
The only other reasons you might go back to earlier rooms might be to grind monsters for exp or gold or items (or souls, as in the case of the Sorrow games), which should already throw out warning lights at you for the simple reason that "grinding" is involved. In Dawn of Sorrow, you are no longer capable of finding any kind of useful equipment in the dungeon and can only get the ultimate weapons by collecting the required souls and then upgrading them. Well, one of the souls necessary for upgrading your greatsword is the Valkyrie soul, right? What I wound up doing was I went and found a room with just a Valkyrie in it, and just killed it over and over again. It wasn't fun, it was a chore. If you have enough MP, you can kill the Valkyrie within two seconds of entering the room. If not, the Valkyrie might stupidly try to stab at you in the air, but it will never NEVER hit you, because it couldn't figure out what most grade schoolers have figured out while playing Space Invaders. In this case, the Valkyrie soul is considered rare, so I spent about five hours grinding for that soul. This is with my character's "Luck" stat boosted in every way possible. I didn't spend five consecutive hours doing this. I did it on nights where I couldn't get to sleep, and killing Valkyries over and over again kind of had a hypnotizing effect to it. And after five of those hours, I finally got rewarded for my efforts, right? No, I gave up. Grinding for souls was pointless, because you don't need any of those overpowered swords to beat the game. Going back and hunting for treasure is useless too, because the treasure is worthless. So that whole game becomes kind of a task, where you try to get from point A to point F as quickly as possible.
None of the Metroid games involved any kind of grinding whatsoever. If you felt like you needed more health or missiles to defeat a boss, you didn't go back to a single room to fight the same group of enemies over and over again. You retrace your steps over the whole "castle" to look for any power-ups you might have missed. This is a much better system than grinding for exp. After that huge paragraph about how Castlevania's grinding sucks you'd expect me to write an equally long paragraph about Metroid, right? But no, this is all I have to say, unfortunately. I'm a fighter, not a lover.