Castlevania: Dawn Of Sorrow Review

Hey! I know those people on that box. They’re from that other game!

Dawn of Sorrow is the direct sequel to Aria Of Sorrow and, as the time I am making this review, the final game in the Castlevania Chronology.

It’s one of the three Castlevania games on the DS and that’s pretty good company to be in. See, unlike the GBA but like the NES, all the Castlevania games on the platform are actually good! Yay!

Soma is doing his thing after the adventures inside the eclipse. The band is all here. But there’s this lady who is looking for the person to assume the soul and powers of Dracula. So she’s narrowed it down to two dudes. Soma, not wanting there to be another Dracula, is going to try and stop this resurrection. Well, more like a reincarnation I guess.

New locations, new enemies, new music, new mechanics… but same old kind of soul system here. Kind of. It’s had some tweeks.

The game retains the same Action Adventure RPG stuff from Aria. Hammer is back with his store. Yoko, however, has a job to do in this game other than just being kind of there to drive the plot. She’ll take souls from the enemies you defeat and use them to upgrade your weapons. This is neat but annoying. Know what I mean? You need souls to upgrade the weapons, so you have to farm even more souls in this game.

Generally the soul farming is… not great in this game either. It takes a while to get everything. However one of the perks to the soul farming, other than the weapon upgrades, is that the more of a certain soul you collect, the more powerful that souls ability becomes. So if you take the Axe Armor, for instance, and collect 5 Axe Armor souls, your axes will be larger, faster, and do more damage. Make sense? Good.

Now. This game is on the DS and what DS game would exist without using the DS’s DS. Well, TS I guess is more accurate. Bosses are locked behind sealed doors and to completely defeat a boss you have to seal the boss itself. The seals in this game are “spells”. To cast the spell you first have to locate it so you can learn it, then you cast it with the touch screen. It’s kind of a times connect the dots/simon game. I’ve only played the game off the DS so I can’t say what it’s like on the system. Emulated it’s… fine. It’s mostly fine.

There are also a couple of souls that require you to use the touch screen. Mostly they’re for puzzle progression, etc.

Other than that, gameplay is basically identical to Aria of Sorrow.

Graphically… oh boy. The game itself looks great. The graphics are crisp and clean, the backgrounds are great, the enemies look good, the bosses look good. BUT… the PORTRAITS. Ugh… the character portraits are hideous.

So Aria had kind of an Amano-ish style to it’s graphics. No one looked very realistic but they were very stylized and it worked with the games overall vibe I think.

Dawn has some weird kind of westernized anime look to it. It’s not great. I would have preferred they kept the old design and just updated them for the DS, but nooooo.

The soundtrack for the game, I think, is really quite good. It’s better than Aria for sure. Part of that is the tracks are legit better, but they don’t have the terrible music system that the GBA had, so that’s a positive right there.

A few of the classic tracks make their way back into the soundtrack which has become a standard for the games since way back.

I recently replayed Dawn and Aria both back to back because I do enjoy these games quite a bit. I think Aria, over all, is slightly more fun than Dawn but Dawn is a very damned good game all the same. If you like this style of game but haven’t ever played this one. Track it down and give it a go. It’s great.

This is an instance where the sum is greater than the whole of the parts.