"Basically, it's Aria of Sorrow perfected."

Back in 2003, when Aria of Sorrow was released, it seemed like the series was going to completely abandon its roots and become a rather generic action/adventure game. Many Castlevania staples were discarded – the whip, the sub-weapons, the main character wasn't a Belmont. Dracula wasn't even the villain, for crying out loud! But somehow the developers managed to create a game that, while very different, managed feel like a proper entry in the series. Not surprisingly, Aria was incredibly popular with fans, and even less surprisingly, Konami decided to make a direct sequel to Aria, reusing almost all of the gameplay mechanics.

Dawn of Sorrow takes place approximately a year after the end of Aria, in which Dracula's castle was sealed inside an eclipse. After that Soma Cruz, the protagonist and heir to the Count's powers, subconsciously released all of the powers that he had accumulated as he was no longer under threat of demonic attack (way to go, genius). Dawn follows a similar premise to Aria and a few other games in the series: a group of Dracula worshippers plans to resurrect the Count. This time around, a sorceress is intent on resurrecting Dracula in order to increase her own magical powers. In order to do that she needs to transfer his powers out of Soma (who, despite being the rightful heir, refuses to give in and become Dracula) and into somebody more willing to become the new Dark Lord.

Needless to say, this does not go over with Soma, who sets off to the sorceress's castle hideout, intent on stopping her before she can harm him or any of his friends. All of the supporting characters from Aria return as well, and for the most part they serve the same roles as before.

Despite the similarities to Aria's storyline, the story in Dawn is different enough to keep things interesting. There are a few plot twists and complexities here and there but, as with most Castlevania games, the story takes a back seat to the gameplay and exploration.

If you've played Aria, then you're already familiar with the mechanics of Dawn, for the most part. As you fight enemies, you will absorb their souls, which will in turn give you new abilities. This includes everything from being able to throw fireballs, to floating in midair, to summoning creatures to fight along side you. Most abilities give you some form of direct attack, but others raise various stats, heal you, or are defensive in nature. While you will have to fight an enemy numerous times before it drops a soul (it's based on random chance, so you might get a soul your first try or it might take forty), the drop rates have be improved significantly over the enemies in Aria. In the last game you might have to fight a single enemy hundreds of times before you finally got the soul. Now it's much more reasonable (though there are still a few enemies that are stubborn).

In Aria, you only needed one soul from an enemy in order to be able to use the ability fully. In Dawn, you have to collect between one and nine souls of a specific enemy type in order to fully power-up the ability. Even with one soul you'll be able to use it, though it will be weak. Fully charged abilities do more damage, last longer, have better range, etc. This is an excellent way of balancing the need to drop souls frequently enough that you don't go insane grinding and the need to keep you from becoming too powerful too quickly by dumping souls in your lap. For the vast majority of the souls, you probably only want one or two for collecting purposes or for powering up your weapons, so you'll only bother fully powering the handful of abilities that you use. All in all, there are probably only four or five abilities that are worth bringing to their full potential. The rest of the souls either function more as tools, and therefore work fine even at a low level, or are just ones you'll never use.

The numerous souls that you won't care enough to power up is reflective of the one negative side-effect of the new soul system. In Aria, since the souls didn't power-up, it was okay for some souls to simply be improved versions of previous ones (e.g. one soul might boost your strength by 4, while a later one boosts your strength by 8), however that doesn't work in Dawn. You get a soul that boost your strength by 4 originally, and then get a few more of the same one until it boosts your strength by 8. As a result, Konami needed to come up with a much larger variety of abilities. For the most part they succeeded; however there are a few duds. Many souls just summon a monster to fight (rather ineffectually) along side you and there's a few that give you absolutely bizarre powers that don't do much. However, for every unimaginative ability, there are several very useful ones. There are also quite a few abilities (both useless and useful) that are a lot of fun to play around with. One of the most fun souls is Persephone, whose soul gives you a demonic vacuum cleaner that can be used to suck up projectiles, bodies, blood, candles, and an enemy's HP.

One of the most useful abilities is to equip two sets of souls, weapons, and armor, and then swap them with the touch of a button. This lets you do things such as keep the axe-throwing ability soul on normally, but when you need to use a different ability soul in order to move past a barrier, you just hit the X button, use the soul, then hit the X button to switch back to your axe, with no need to go through the equip menu. It is almost impossible to describe just how convenient this is. Other highly convenient, but minor changes including having certain souls, like the one that lets you move under water, always on, rather than having to be equipped when you needed to go for a swim. Overall, the changes to the soul system are not radical, but are a series of tweaks that greatly improves the game by removing a lot of the more tedious aspects.

The developers seem to have taken the idea of powering things up and ran with it. You will also be able to fuse the souls of enemies with weapons in order to create more powerful weapons. There are a ton of weapons including heavy swords, katanas, clubs, spears, axes, fists, and daggers. All of the weapons have different strengths, speeds, and attack patterns. Most of the weapons are medieval in origin and pretty much the traditional weapons for games of this type. There are a few more advanced weapons, including two handguns and a rocket-propelled grenade. You'll be able to find and buy a lot of the lower and mid level weapons; however for weapons of any decent power, you're going to have to use souls. While this does inevitably lead to grinding, for the most part you'll spend less time grinding for souls than you do for gold in a typical game. There are also a few magical rings that you can get somewhat late in the game that make it easier to get money and souls, further reducing the amount of time you spending trying to collect money and materials.

One nuisance is that there are three ultimate weapons that require the souls of bosses. As there is only one of each boss in the game, it means you can either have the best weapon or all of the souls. Now, the game isn't so difficult that you must have the best weapons to survive, however it is an annoyance for people who like to collect everything in a game.

In addition to revising the soul system, Dawn features several other improvements over Aria, made possible by the fact that it's on the Nintendo DS instead of the Game Boy Advance. Most prominently is the use of the second screen as a way of permanently displaying the castle map (instead of having to switch between it and the game using the select button). While this may seem like an almost trivial improvement, it is actually incredibly convenient. You have two displays that can be toggled on the upper screen. Besides the map, you have a status screen that will tell you Soma's current stats, what souls he has equipped, how much gold he has, and how much experience he needs to get to the next level. It will also show you a brief summary of the last enemy that you hit, telling you its name, its weaknesses, what items it drops, the chance of getting a soul, and how many of its souls you already have. This is yet another fantastic feature that saves you from having to look thing up in the menu or on a FAQ. Unfortunately it does not tell you how much HP the enemy has or how much gold and experience you get for defeating it.

As can be expected, the visuals and audio are greatly improved over the Game Boy Advance titles. All three GBA games (Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow) were impressive looking, but paled in comparison to their spiritual predecessor, Symphony of the Night, for the original PlayStation. The DS is much closer to the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in terms of power, and it shows. While certainly not as visually impressive as Symphony, the colors are much richer, the environments and backgrounds much more detailed, and the enemies larger and more animated. The audio, while certainly nowhere near the quality that you could get on a CD based game, is leaps and bounds above anything the Game Boy Advance could produce.

In addition to simply looking a lot better, the castle is wonderfully designed. There's a wide variety of areas, including a village on the outskirts of the castle, underground catacombs, multiple high towers, as well as the obligatory clock tower and throne room. All of these sections mesh together very nicely, and have numerous entry points and transporter rooms that allow for very rapid movement through the castle. One very nice design element is that there is one area that naturally lends to being your "headquarters", for lack of a better term. This hub area, which you get to right after the first boss, contains both shops, a save point, and a transporter room, which allows you to get done whatever you need to do in one convenient location. One gripe about Aria was that the save room was annoying far from the store and nearest transporter room, which meant repeatedly having to go through long rooms of weak enemies whenever you needed something.

What's an even bigger improvement over Aria is the enemy design; especially the bosses. Despite offering brand new ability mechanics, Aria brought very little to the table in terms of new enemies. They were pretty much the same ones that have been appearing since Symphony or before, and were getting kind of stale. While Dawn keeps many of the standard enemies (skeletons, axe knights, those damn bats, and so on), it also adds just as many new ones. What's even more noticeable is the improvement in the boss design. From the mythological classics to the absolutely bizarre, nearly every boss is impressive, especially the last one. They all have a very unique style as well – one hides in mirrors, one summons swarms of locust, another is a giant marionette with voodoo dolls of you. Overall, Dawn has the best group of bosses of any Castlevania.

As another way of adapting the game for the Nintendo DS, you can use the touch screen to navigate menus, select options, and choose your destination when warping, which a nice touch. What's even nicer is that the game doesn't try to force it on you, as you can still use the directional pad and A/B buttons like you did in previous games. So, if you happen to have the stylus out (though that really won't happen too much) you can use it, or you can just play the game normally. Many of the early DS games forced you to use the touch screen unnaturally just because the technology was there, so it's nice to see developers moving away from that and only using it when it makes sense.

But, with great power comes great ways in which you can add really annoying things to a game and call it a feature. As part of the plot, you will have to learn how to draw "magic seals" which can be used to seal bosses away for good after you beat them to a pulp. Not surprisingly you literally draw the magic seals using the touch screen on the DS. There are five seals in all, and while the first one is very basic, they get progressively more complicated. To understand just how annoying these things can be, imagine that you've just beaten a really hard boss and barely survived. Now imagine that the boss suddenly regains a good chunk of its HP because you were a fraction of a second off when it can to drawing a bunch on lines on the screen. Though it can be incredibly frustrating, it doesn't cripple the game. While the window of opportunity in which to draw the seal is short, it isn't impossibly so; you just have to have memorized the seal and draw quickly (fortunately you don't have to be precise at all). It's also annoying because you have to use both hands to play the game and then quickly grab the stylus. Basically, no good can come from this system. You either do it properly and then move on without giving it a second thought, or you screw up and end up really pissed off at the game. It just seems like a forced way of making sure we realize that it's a DS game and not a GBA game, which really wasn't necessary.

That's the biggest gripe of the game, and it isn't even that big of one. There are a few other issues, but they are trivial. For starters, they decided to play up the crush that the one character had on another in Aria. It never goes anywhere, but results in a rather large amount of dialog whenever you go to buy something from the weapon store. Fortunately you can just hit the start button to skip over all of the talking and get down to business. The other character that you talk to a lot occasionally drops hints as to where to go or how to defeat one of the enemies. These hints are usually too little and too late – she generally only tells you the obvious and tends to give you the hint long after you've defeated whatever boss she's talking about.

One thing that, for once, doesn't get added to the list of flaws is the "second quest" – Julius mode. Ever since Symphony, after you finish the main game, you can play through as another character. For the most part these modes are designed to appeal to fans of the classic games – so there are no items, alternate weapons, powerups, often no leveling, and in games that don't star a Belmont, the character is one of the whip-wielding Vampire Killers. Unfortunately, with the exception of Circle of the Moon and Lament of Innocence, up until now these modes have been lacking. They tended to feel tacked on as an after thought, lacked any sort of a plot, and didn't have much focus since you go usually skip most of the castle. Well, Konami seems to have slowly figured out that fans really like these and finally started putting some effort into them.

If you're a fan of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, then Julius mode is for you. While there are no branching paths, the character swap returns. You'll be playing as Julius originally, but eventually Yoko Belnades and Genya Arikado join your party, and can be switched to at any time. This likely inspired Portrait of Ruin, which uses almost the same system for the entire game. Julius mirrors the abilities of Trevor Belmont, Yoko mirrors Sypha (her ancestor), and Genya mirrors Alucard, though there is unfortunately no equivalent to Grant. While not exactly the same as the NES classic, as you level up and have all of your sub-weapons available at any time, it is enough of a nostalgia trip to satisfy anyone.

In addition to having excellent gameplay, Julius mode also features an actual story. It's set up in the main game to work as an epilogue for one of the possible endings, and is pretty much exactly the plot that Julius mode in Aria should have had. It isn't particularly deep and there are only a few cut-scenes, but it's enough to make you feel like you have two complete games on the cartridge.

As can be expected by now, there is also a Boss Rush mode, in which you have to fight through several of the bosses as quickly as possible. You are rewarded with a new weapon or piece of armor, depending on your completion time. The weapons are quirky ones that make the game more amusing, such as the Terror Bear, a teddy bear that you beat enemies down with. New Game + also returns, allowing you to play the game from the beginning, but with all of your weapons and most of the souls from your previous play. It can be fun at times as it allows you to quickly run through the game bashing everything in sight. It's also the only way to get all souls and all weapons on one save file.

While the three Game Boy Advance titles were all at least decent, and Aria specifically was a good game, the series was in danger of becoming stale. Harmony and Aria were trying too hard to be "the next Symphony" without adding anything enough new material to stand on their own. Aria did introduce the soul system, which one of the best additions to the series, but it lacked unique monsters and impressive bosses. Dawn injected enough fresh blood to keep the series going. It took all of the good from Aria and improved it, dropped of the bad, and added its own twists and features, making it a breath of fresh air. It also made marvelous use of the power and new tools offered by the DS, further separating it from the previous titles.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/17/08

Game Release: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (US, 10/04/05)