Ok, We Can Get to Dawn of Sorrow Some More

Yesterday was hectic and weird, as I'm sure it was for a lot of people just coming back from a holiday break, so let me expand a little bit on Dawn of Sorrow.

First, let me say that, honestly, there isn't that much to say about the game as a whole. It does everything that its predecessor, Aria of Sorrow, had done, just a little more of it. In fact, you could say that it's classic sequelitis: the second game looks better, plays similarly, and shoehorns in unnecessary added story and play mechanics. Perhaps playing the first right after the second did this game fewer favors than it probably should have, and that's fine. There were enough years in between one game and the next that it didn't feel like a redundancy ten years ago when I first played it. But in the here and now, Dawn of Sorrow took a great game and stuffed it so full of junk food that it came out covered with pimples. There. That's a weird analogy for you.

In the continuum so far, we have Circle of the Moon, which I haven't played in a few years and have been purposely avoiding for this exercise, but I still think is a pretty good game. Harmony of Dissonance came after, and it felt too much like Iga's team shuffled in and said, "let's do that last game, but better," and it sort of wasn't. Then they hunkered down, came up with a nifty system to keep people playing during their commutes, and made Aria of Sorrow, which turned out to be a light, fun tear through the formula with a hefty grind involved. In scope of that, Dawn of Sorrow almost feels like the Harmony of Dissonance to Aria's Circle of the Moon. The team went back in, found that they wanted to do the same game over again but better, and made something that wound up feeling bland in the end.

Here's where I defend it a little, though: Dawn of Sorrow through a certain lens is kind of a cynical game. From what I've read on Wikipedia, Aria of Sorrow didn't sell up to expectations, which is a shame. A lot of work went into the design of that game, and I think it shows by the sheer craftsmanship of the characters and backgrounds and how much time and effort must have went into designing the Tactical Soul system. I get that the team --and maybe Iga specifically-- probably took a good long look at the systems specifically and said, "no, guys. This was too much to just give up on," and went to work finding ways to expand on what they had instead of tossing out the baby with the bathwater (as most of the other games had done successively). By this time, the Castlevania franchise was starting to fall into some shaky times. The 3D console games didn't set the world on fire, and the handheld releases were starting to feel more esoteric with further complex entries. The DS, only a year old when Dawn of Sorrow was released, was finding an audience with both younger crowds and a wider demographic than both its predecessors and its console competitors, so they knew that adjustments had to have been made. In that respect, what DoS does make a lot of sense.

So the character art changed. It kind of bounced off of me at the time, but it's fine now that we're ten years removed. And, again, I get it; the moody, ethereal style of the Ayami Kojima key art and box covers don't really appeal to a much younger set, and might scare off parents stumbling through a GameStop. The Tactical Soul system, even though we had already seen it before, fed into the "catch 'em all" mechanic du jour that handheld games had adopted in a post-Pokemon world. Maybe, they thought, the second time was the charm. It's possible, even, that Iga and his teams knew that producing console Castlevania games was too resource intensive, and they went back to the well with the castle and system design from Aria to keep things fast and cheap. He's even said himself over the years that he had a rep for getting his games done on time and under budget, and anyone that's followed the games industry over the past decade or so knows that reusing assets and design plans is the number one method of saving a buck.

What this all comes back around to, like every Castlevania game I've been looking at in granular detail lately, is context. Iga only produced two more games for handhelds after this, and a multiplayer cash-in game that was nothing but reused art made on the budget of whatever you probably have in your pocket right now. The series was not only falling into a rut, but its chief architect was slowly being shuffled along away from a franchise he had a hand in saving. The DS entries had the good fortune of being released on one of the most successful dedicated video game machines ever produced, but it looks like even Igarashi was starting to see the writing on the wall. I'm starting to think that the next game, Portrait of Ruin, was something of a response to all of this, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. I have to go through that with a finer-toothed comb.

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.

Annotated Appendix: The Royal Chapel

This one was a pain, and I think it shows.

Not only were there delays on its completion (and more delays that personally hurt, which I don't want to get into), for some reason, this whole episode just feels... off to me. The muffled audio is probably a really good sign of that, and maybe I'm just being my own worst critic, but I just get this feeling that the seems are really showing in this ep. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'd appreciate the feedback.

If there's an epicenter from which that paranoia spawns, though, it must be from the fact that this is the first section of the game where I have no direct developer commentary to pull from. The Entrance had tons of info online about it straight from the producer's mouth, and other locations had their own share of tidbits from people involved with the game here and there. The RC, though? Nope. I had to strip mine any shred of knowledge that I could via the Castlevania wiki and other internet sources. It's still good stuff, and all accurate to the best of my knowledge. Sadly, though, I couldn't just fly to Japan to get the game's directors to play the whole thing with me (the closest thing is the Double Fine Dev's Play video, which is referenced constantly anyway), so cool, in-depth dev history on specific locations is going to start becoming a little scarce.

I worry that I also shot my wad a little bit with the backtracking filler about magic use, but since people have complained --rightfully, I might add-- that I should be using it more often to get through the game, it was worth addressing because it will absolutely come up in the Colosseum video.

What all of this angst is getting at, I suppose, is that there's always going to be something interesting to say or point out about the game. I'm just worried that I've gone through the really fascinating deep knowledge because it all seemed front loaded. Maybe that should be your incentive to keep watching the videos, though. YOU NEVER KNOW, or whatever.

I'm also starting to kick around the idea of starting a Patreon for the channel for a few reasons. The first is to help me replace anything that might go south during this whole endeavor, like another disc if a meteor strikes or something and ruins my original, an OEM PlayStation 2 pad because all of this backdashing is certainly destroying a few buttons, or (God forbid) my laptop because it's already doing more than I should be asking of it. The second is that I was thinking of doing a video of some of the differences in the Saturn version to coincide the quieter moments in the inverted castle. I know I could just emulate that stuff, but again, I don't want to put any more undue stress on the PC than I have to. Part of me feels as though I should probably just buy a copy of the Saturn version to have around anyway, too. I don't know. Still tossing the idea around, so any opinions on that would be welcome, too.

Anyhoo, thanks again for watching.

Mount Doom and the Ring

Games Journalism has broken the internet this week, no matter how little Sephen Totilo wants to admit its existence. Twitter has gone ape, and blogs from crackpots are hitting critical mass. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this started it, but you should also read this, and this, and this. Please do so now.

Ok. The point of having this blog is to be upfront and honest with people (I think), so here's the situation: I've been in an absolute funk for the past few months since 1UP has shut down. Part of it is that I was very emotionally invested into the site. Even though I came a little late to the party after its supposed heyday, I jumped ship from GameSpot to 1UP because of things they did well: engaging staff, smart writing, and the podcasts and shows. I knew that, even though I wasn't as involved with the community as I probably could have been, that was the place for me, and it was always among the first sites I would visit every morning. But it was more than that for me. 1UP represented an end point, a dream job. I've writing about games for a years now, and even a few years before I got hip to Retronauts, the Oddcast, and the 1UP Show. That was the place I wanted to work, and I wanted to do it with those people creatively starting that kind of content. It was one of the few times in a person's life when they knew exactly what they wanted and where they knew they could get it.

But 1UP was fraught with internal strife, mostly from the management side, and that caused multiple shake-ups, layoffs, restructures, etc. That didn't make it easy, or even practical, to try to move to San Francisco and hope that I score an internship or even start to work freelance for them. After I got sick in 2010, it made it that much harder to pack up and go anywhere. I still wanted to be a games writer, but I had to do it in Cleveland for the time being.

But, man, this week. Pointed criticism of the way the "traditional" model of games journalism is busted is starting to make even the layman and sometimes-contributor take better notice of what's really going on, even though I could clearly see that changes had to happen a couple of years ago. Both Ben Kuchera and Patrick Miller seem to agree that solid, investigative journalism is crumbling under the pressure of the absolute necessity of page clicks, and that the holy trinity of current games writing (news, previews, and reviews) is not a sustainable model for either good writing or even ethical practices when it's all just restructured PR.

For a long time, these were things that I was striving to do well, keeping my head in the sand that even though there are hundreds or even thousands of places on the internet that do the exact same thing, I could find work at one of the larger sites based on skill, experience, and a Bruce Wayne- like force of will. Over the past year or so, I've learned that I need to break free from that and do other kinds of work, but the perfect storm of listening to the final 1UP podcast, reading those articles, and losing out on PAX Prime tickets (which was going to be part fun, part schmoozing for contacts) --along with losing my original goal of working at 1UP in February-- has definitely given me some sobering perspective. I'm 33, married, and my wife and I have both gone through some serious issues with our health even though we're two of the most healthy people you might ever meet. I'll write about games forever, and I have immediate plans to do so, but this hasn't been the best week for Achieving Your Dreams.

I want to contribute to something that I love so much, and the mounting evidence that places on the internet to do so for a living will bottom out sooner than later is depressing. That's one of the reasons I wrote about a renewed perspective a few weeks ago on this blog, because it's time to learn new things and reform my outlook. There is great work on the internet about games, the culture of games, and the creation of games. Previewing them and reviewing them might not go away (and my gut says that I don't want them to), and the odds of so many sites doing it in the next five years still existing is almost ludicrous. But I have to shake out of this funk, even though I know not so deep down that this is a hobby and nothing more.

If anything, I can keep trying to grab freelance work, and I still have the book to write, but it's hard to give up on that down-the-road mentality, that sometime-in-the-future perspective. After Dorritogate a few months ago, I (maybe stubbornly) decided to pull myself up from the bootstraps and try harder, but it's just been one hit after the next lately. Is it time to regroup again, or is it time to get my priorities straight? If great writers like Frank Cifaldi and Bob Mackey have to do the same thing now that they were unceremoniously let go from their jobs, it's going to be ridiculous for me to be on the same boat.