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23.9.2023
With a mixture of metroidvania and platforming coolness paired with anime aesthetics and classic horror film tropes, "Castlevania Aria of Sorrow" and its sequel "Dawn of Sorrow" are genuinely fun, without overstaying their welcome and branching off into the hardcore/soulslike segment like a lot of current titles from the genre do.
Aria of Sorrow came out for the Game Boy Advance and was the 3rd of the metroidvania style titles that came out for the handheld. As such, it ironed out all the paper cuts that the previous 2 entries had and, with the series greats Koji Igarashi and Michiru Yamane being involved, the game has an aesthetic that's perhaps only held back by its hardware limitations. And with current rom hacks which can improve on the GBA's oversaturated colours and high brightness, the game can look almost as gorgeous as "Symphony of the Night."
On the other hand, being that it comes years after its hard to top progenitor, it could improve on a few aspects and streamline others, so that the game feels more like a 2000s action RPG experience than something from the 90s. The story is simple with a few twists while keeping the familiar set-up of a kind hero going against a castle full of monsters and the Big Bad. However, this time we're in the near future of 2035 and we're kindly reminded that Dracula was captured in a solar eclipse "off-screen" in 1999. Soma Cruz, a young exchange student from Spain visiting a Japanese shrine during a new eclipse, is suddenly transported to Dracula's castle and has to be become the new hero. Also unlike previous titles, characters in the game are many times not what they seem, although it won't be anything that will shock you, as the somewhat kitschy anime soul of the title is rife with precictability.
Unlike the whip weilding Belmonts or dampyr Alucard from previous games, Soma is new to all this, yet gifted with the ability of acquiring souls of slain enemies which either give him new offensive abilities, defensive ones or new ways to traverse the castle's innitially unreachable areas. This new gimmick gives the creators the freedom to craft a relatively short game, while making souls variably easy or hard to get based on luck or skill, providing a great experience to both those like me who'd like to get to the ending quickly, as well as the 100%ers. Especially its direct sequel, Dawn of Sorrow released for the Nintendo DS, has a reputation of being way too short--I however rather cherish the 2000s' metroidvania with their 7-10 hour game time, not relying on too much padding or tedious challenges in order to artificially extend the game's value (as it felt like in "Symphony of the Night's" second castle).
"Dawn of Sorrow" also looks and sounds several tiers better than Aria, almost as good as Symphony of the Night. One rather unfortunate exception would be the new generic anime character portraits they drew, which look worse than in Aria and give the game a more goofy tone, but it's nothing a ROM hack couldn't fix. I was lucky to play the sequel on an emulator, being that its new gimmick of drawing a seal with the Nintendo DS' stylus in order to finish bosses or get into specific rooms felt tedious and somehow hard to manage when in the midst of playing a game which 99% of the time uses d-pad and buttons. Thankfully, rom hacks do away with this and automatically draw the seals or let you shoot at those ice blocks you had to pop with the stylus or mouse/touchscreen when on emulators--and luckily, even on real hardware, you'll rarely have to rely on the touch shenanigans. Otherwise, the sequel I'd say is only slightly worse than part 1, mainly because it's pretty much more of the same. Nevertheless, it's quite enjoyable.
All the GBA metroidvania from the series, including Aria, have recently been re-released for the Switch. I usually find that Nintendo's pricing on classic games is extortion, but all those 3 games are top notch and well worth the 20ish EUR asking price. However, I do think Aria shines best when played on an emualtor with a patched ROM that corrects the colours. I replayed it recently with the patch on my hacked Vita with an OLED screen. Dawn of Sorrow has AFAIK only been released on the Nintendo DS. Given the DS' 2 screen nature, it takes a while to have a nice looking set-up on a bit monitor, but I fared well with the main screen taking up almost all of the screen while screen 2, which mostly shows the map, was a small 10% square in the bottom right half. I then could switch the 2 screens by pressing a button on my controller.
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HTTPS Link to Romhacking.net: Aria of Sorrow recolouring patch with 2 distinct colour palettes
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