Ok, We Can Get to Dawn of Sorrow, Now

I was in a mall in Blue Ash, OH, a suburb of Cincinnati, in the fall of 2006. That's what you do when you're in your mid-20s and away from home for work; you wrap yourself in the blanket of commerce when you exhaust all other options to fill the time. I wasn't quite up to going to bars by myself very often at that point as post-college life tended to still maintain the semblance of "bars are for getting totally shitty drunk on weekends and nothing else," so after getting bored with hotel television and having suffered enough filthy looks for reading most of the comics in a Barnes & Noble (but I still payed for my coffee, dammit), the mall filled the time. The mall in Blue Ash. The mall in a suburb. The mall where I dug deep and convinced myself to fall further into credit card debt for a used Nintendo DS and Dawn of Sorrow.

Suddenly, I was totally fine sitting in my hotel room for hours on end, because I bled every possible second of playtime I could get out of DoS. By that point, I certainly knew it existed having followed the previous handheld Castlevanias and the 3D console games that had been developed in the preceding years. But though I was finally living in my own apartment with a job that I kind of liked, I still didn't have the dough to throw around on video game consoles that weren't my ancient PlayStation 2 and its vast library of RPGs. But that shit was still in Cleveland and I was four hours away. I justified my GBA purchase years prior to wanting it specifically for Castlevania games, and it seemed like an equally good idea in 2006 (and it turned out be true).

I just wish it was as good a game now as I thought it was back then.

Ok, be with me here, because it's still a very good game. Time, though, hasn't been so nice to DoS as it has some of the other franchise games. Is it in the sewer level with other games like Castlevania Adventure? No, it's built way better than that. But after what has to be close to 1000 hours of Symphony and the two previous IGA-produced handheld games within the last few months, it's a distant horse in the race for the top.

First, the good stuff. It was years between playing Aria of Sorrow on a Game Boy Advance and Dawn on the DS, so it never quite hit me back then how much of a visual leap the series had taken. Now, after playing them back-to-back, it's a dramatic switch. Backgrounds looks really spectacular and ooze character, specifically the chilly small town in the first section of the game where snow falls off of parked cars when lept upon. The character animation is routinely beautiful, too, but much clearer with the DS's added resolution. And, really, there's not enough great things to be said for a second screen with this franchise; having to halt the action to bring up a map has always been a minor nuisance, but having one right in your face the entire time makes it downright irritating to go back to older games after this.

But the flaws of Aria's design instruct too many of Dawn's, which is harder to swallow now that we're 10 years past its release. If you remember what I said a little while ago about Aria giving up on clever clues to point you in the next direction in favor of enemy soul farming and tedious grinding, you'll find that Dawn makes this blatant with locked off doors that require specific enemy souls to open. It's not bad enough that the player has has to stumble around to find the required powers to pass these walls, its that they have to recall where the specific enemies are located to obtain them, and then kill them ad nauseum. It's not totally terrible, I guess, but I wouldn't really call it fun. Worse, these games were built on the foundation of nearly 10 years of post-Symphony of the Night expertise, so you would expect a better level of level design. Aria of Sorrow, in this case, takes the taco by suggesting a certain level of redundancy to finish the game. Dawn or Sorrow requires it, and it's a drag.

If you know anything about this game, then you will know its chief criticism lies in the idiotic touch screen controls. If you don't, then let me set the stage for you: you spend mounting wasted moments of your precious life, which you often feel fragmenting away from you in greater and heavier chunks, by learning the patterns and reactive measures to final complete a challenging boss fight. Weapon loadouts have been altered. Statistics have been adjusted. Every possible advantage you have has been employed. And then, upon delivering the final blow to that giant evil whatever that you've been matching skills with, a convoluted game of connect-the-dots flashes on the screen, and you need to drop everything to fumble around with the DS's stylus to complete it. You will not get these the first time, and the boss fight extends. Then you lose, because your nerves are mangled. This was profoundly stupid to write, and is that much dumber in practice.

These are two very damning pieces of evidence against an otherwise very good game. Even as far as the Metroidvania end of this series goes, the castle is still fun to explore and looks great, but constantly reliance to grind and (what I am assuming is) a misguided stipulation on Konami to use the touch screen on Nintendo's fancy pants new handheld makes this game lesser than its pedigree would suggest. From where my memories rest, I'm as surprised as you.