Castlevania: Portrait Of Ruin Review

We did it! We got to the end of the CV DS VGs! That’s Castlevania DS Video Games for you kids you aren’t in the know.

This is the final of the games of the series for the system we’re going to be reviewing and I hope you’re ready for what, some might describe, as the finest moment in human history.

Those people, however, would be wrong.

Portrait Of Ruin (PoR for short) takes places in the 1940’s in grand old Europe. It is the follow up story to Castlevania Bloodlines and gives us a couple of new characters to introduce to ridiculous situations.

Johnathan Morris – son of John Morris (very original names) from Bloodlines and his pal Charlotte Aulin (no known previous associations though supposedly is from one of them legendary clans of vampire hunters anyway) are kind of like bounty hunters in a way. They are hired to go investigate and deal with spooky and vampire related happenings.

In PoR they arrive at the latest incarnation of Dracula’s Castle at the behest of the local church. There they meet up with a priest named Vincent to tells them that the vampire Brauner is responsible for the castle coming back and the eventual resurrection of Ol’ Drac.

Inside the castle they meet a ghost called Wind who seems to want to help the two figure out what’s what around here, and gives them tasks to do like… throw 100 rocks at a cactus without breaking a sweat. But also finding medicine. You know. Super important stuff like that.

The dynamic duo eventually meet up with Brauner and his two daughters. Brauner says he’s got no interesting in bringing back Dracula and our heroes are just being silly.

As we make our way through the castle we find that there are some inter-dimensional paintings that we have to enter, clean out the bad guys, unlock abilities within, and then repeat that process a few times before we can have the big meeting with the big bad at the end of the game.

There’s some plot twists and revelations and all that so be found here so the story is at least partly interesting in that manner.

One of the more interesting things that comes up, I think, is we learn a little more about the history of The Vampire Killer whip. See, the Belmonts aren’t around anymore because the whip seems to literally kill you the more you use it. John Sr. had the power of the whip sealed so John Jr. wouldn’t suffer the same fate that Sr. did, but this left Jr. feeling a little inadequate and less of the vampire hunter that he thought he should be.

Along with that, we find out a little bit more about what happened with Eric after the events of Bloodlines also. So wrapping things up kind nicely there.

Game play is standard to what we’ve seen on the GBA and DS. Action Adventure RPG style with abilities needed to access future points of the game. There’s equipment and levels and consumables and all that to manage here as well.

Where Dawn Of Sorrow (Dos) and Order Of Ecclesia (OoE) had their own little gimmicks with the souls and glyphs respectively, PoR does away with that stuff and stick to a more traditional “Just equip this stick and go beat stuff with it.”

There’s plenty of different weapons, sub-weapons, armor, spells, and accessories for John and Char to equip during their time in the castle and, I think more than any other game, you really do need to be proficient in a variety of skills in this game to succeed.

Oh yeah. This game does have a gimmick though. You can swap out between the two characters at, basically, any time. John is your physical fighter. He takes hit, he gives hits. He’s strong but not terribly smart. Char is a basically a witch. She doesn’t take a punch well but can cast some pretty powerful magic. Magic that is terribly useless sometimes and amazingly OP at other times.

Along with swapping out you can have the super smart computer play as the second character when you want to team up. This is generally a bad idea because the computer is pretty dumb. Don’t do it.

But what you can do with that second character out on screen is kind of useful sometimes. Maybe you need to push a big heavy thing and it’s too big and heavy for one person to push. Well, call your partner and the two of you can get that done no problem.

Gotta jump you can’t quite make? Get a boost by literally jumping off your partners head.

And even better, there are dual spell techniques in the game that combine the power of J and C to unleash super devastating (or totally useless) attacks on the enemies. Things like lightning storms, fireballs from the sky, spinning in a circle and physically attacking. Yeah. It’s as awesome as it sounds.

It’s kind of fun when you get the feel for it and you can swap in and out on the fly and do a lot of neat stuff with the two characters. There are even a couple of instances where the gender of your character matters for a fight or two. Maybe there’s a lady that can charm John, but it doesn’t work on Char. See what I’m saying.

Graphically I think this is a great game. It’s better than DoS even thought he style is basically same. We have no previous versions of these characters (minus one of them) to refer back to so I think the designs and portraits just fit better here than they did in DoS. That said though the game does have a more cartoony vibe to it than OoE. So, while I think this is great, I’ve gotta put OoE above it for personal preference.

But the enemy designs are still good, a lot of them you’ll know from other games though. The locations all are unique and some of them do look pretty danged nice. Night time in the desert for instance, big fan of that one.

Musically I think I’ve got to put this game on par with DoS. It’s good, there’s a few good tracks here for sure but I don’t enjoy it as much as I do OoE, again. Nothing bad here, nothing wrong. Just I like the vibes of OoE’s music better. There are, of course, some of the classic themes that make a resurgence here. So if you’re still digging the CV Nes games music you’ll find things to like here.

Well. All that said. What should I say about PoR. It’s very not poor. I think it’s a great game. The story is good, the gameplay is great, the graphics and music are good. I don’t know what was going on at Konami at the time the DS was around but they really did hit it out of the park with all three DS games. Which is nice because the GBA games were all over the place.