Cycopl

dawn of sorrow

no it's not the name of an emo song i'm writing

it's just the best castlevania game ever

Dawn of sorrow is seriously the best castlevania game ever. It's better than Symphony of the Night. It's not really a new experience like symphony of the night was when I played it, but it takes everything good about any of the 2d castlevania games, and puts them into one game. The souls system is the best, it's crazy how many different souls there are and how many different abilities you can use from them. The weapon synthing makes you go out and hunt for specific souls, some of them become very valuable because of the weapons they are used to make and their difficulty to obtain.

There are lots of things to make you keep playing, like the reward for getting 100% of all souls collected, or the new game + model. Imagine chrono trigger's new game +, except they make you level 1 again. You still have your uber weapons and armor though, so it's still pretty easy. There's a hard mode, and julius mode, which lets you play as Julius Belmont, Yoko Belnades, and best of all, Alucard. Alucard looks exactly like he does in symphony of the night. He controls exactly like SotN and his animations are exactly the same. Seriously, if you have a DS, you need this game.

It could have just as easily been on any console, the touch screen features are gimmicky and not a major part of the game, and the second screen just shows a map or a status screen, so nither is really necessary, but they just add to the DS experience I guess. It's really convenient to have your map up there all the time, so you can just glance at where you're going instead of having to constantly hit select to check your map or whatever. Same goes for the status screen, there are many occasions where the status screen has been convenient for me, like checking whether or not I have a monster's soul, or how much money I have at the time. The DS's second screen is basically just a convenience.

There's other stuff in the game but I haven't gotten around to messing with it yet. I have put 25 hours into the game, and I'm still crazy about it and play it any chance I get. I think it took me maybe 8 hours to go through the game the first time, which is about standard for Symphony of the night style castlevania games. I don't even think symphony of the night took me more than 8-10 hours to beat, so I'm pretty happy with how much time I've gotten out of Dawn of Sorrow already, not to mention the game modes I haven't tried yet (boss rush mode).