"Wow. Best CV game ever, Possibly the best 2d game ever."

So I got a hold of the European version of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow a little over a week ago. Here's what I have to say about it:

The first thing you'll see is a neat anime intro, if you're a fan of the style you might like it. You'll see a few characters performing beam-like powerful looking attacks. You'll also get a taste of the music in the intro, which is excellent, even if it's limited by the DS hardware.

Once you've seen the intro, it's on to the menu. You'll be given options to listen to the music and Japanese voices in the game and change the sound settings. If you feel like changing the control scheme, you can do so in-game.

There's also a wireless mode if you feel like beating rooms of enemies and competing with your friend while doing so to see who can reach the end first, and an Enemy Set mode which is basically putting enemies into those rooms and testing them out solo.

But now you're just going to start your adventure. The plot doesn't seem that complicated at first, it's year 2036, a year after Aria of Sorrow. An evil woman who is a leader of a cult appears and screws things up a bit and you're adventure starts off fairly quickly. I don't want to spoil any plot, I'll just tell you that it's very good and you won't be disappointed with it.

If you've played Aria of Sorrow for the GBA beforehand you'll know the characters and the story elements. If you haven't, it's no big loss, but if you really want a good grip on what's going on, play AoS or ask on the AoS board about the story.

The gameplay in the game is awesome. In my opinion, the best in any castlevania game. If you haven't played CV before, it's quite similar to the metroid games, except it's got some RPG elements like leveling up and equipment/magic and such. A big plus is that it's got almost no backtracking because of the warps. You've got a map on the top screen and gameplay is on the bottom screen. I would've preferred it the other way since my top screen is less dirty because the bottom (touch) screen is abused by touching.

In the game you equip weapons (Swords, axes, spears, guns, teddy bears), armor and accessories. And of course, just like in AoS, you collect souls by killing enemies in this game. All weapons also have special attacks by pressing A, the better weapons have cooler looking and more useful specials than the earlier ones, it's too bad using those cost twice as much magic as they should, which is why it's more popular to use souls instead.

You can equip 3 souls at a time, 2 of which consume magic.
One is activated by pressing up+attack (like throwing an axe or shooting a fireball),
one by pressing R (calling out a familiar to help you, shoot a beam of energy)
and one which doesn't use up magic and is always in effect.

Back to the game. It's divided is divided in many areas and they each have their own theme and music playing. You start out in the only outside area in a place they call Lost Village, it's a real neat snowy environment, this place looks and sounds really great.

Still in Lost Village you'll reach sort of a lobby area where you've got:
a shop to buy stuff
a place to upgrade your weapons by sacrificing souls you've collected
a save spot (red square on the map)
a warp spot (blue square) that becomes available later.
You'll be going here to upgrade your weapons and shop for stuff all the time. And did I mention the warps are great? Without them the backtracking would be insane.

What you do in the game is visit area, beat boss, gain his soul that enables you to enter more places you couldnt before. Like one boss soul will let you become a bat, one will let you double jump, etc etc.

By the way, the bosses in the game are awesome. There are about 15 of them and I can tell you you won't be disappointed with them. There's also a Boss Rush mode to be unlocked which lets you pummel through them all, if you can do it fast enough you'll be rewarded with sweet weapons like Nunchucks and a rocket launcher.

Touching in the game is used to remove crystals on the screen once you've gotten the soul that lets you do so, it's also used to draw seals which you need to do in order to beat bosses. Good to know is that once a seal appears you can calmly take out your stylus, but once you put the stylus on the screen you have to be quick to draw the seal.

The music in the game is FANTASTIC. Although it's midi, which is a shame, it's still very well composed. It has some classic remixed tunes such as bloody tears in it too, but I was surprised with how good the new music is in the game. The voices in the game are still Japanese, at least in the EU version. Being a fan of Anime, I don't mind the japanese grunts at all, and you shouldn't either.

The difficulty is fine in the game, harder than most castlevanias. If you're having trouble with a boss, just level up a bit before fighting him and you should eventually be able to take him. Thankfully theres a Hard mode in the game unlocked after beating normal. You'll play it with everything you collected from the normal save, even then, starting with the best equipment, the game becomes very hard after a while. It's quite the challenge.

Theres also a Julius mode to be unlocked. It let's you play as Julius, Yoko and Alucard (from Symphony of the Night).
I've had the game for over a week and I still haven't beaten Julius mode/hard mode. Collecting souls and beating Normal, Hard, Julius mode and Boss rush adds ALOT of replay value.

And I almost forgot, the visuals are mindblowingly awesome. There are only a few areas in the game that have 3d backgrounds, but those are awesome. You're outside and you see the roofs of detailed buildings in full 3d as backgrounds which is amazing, I wish they had more of those areas in the game.

Other than that, the 2d sprites are high res and everything has a lot of detail to it. All the souls in AoS look like crap compared to the ones in DoS, and Soma has a lot more animations now, for example swinging a sword vertically in AoS looked horrible, he only used one arm and the sword just moved from A to B at the exact same speed with no "woosh" effects or anything. Here, in DoS, they fixed that.

Killing zombies with blood gushing all over the place and seeing their bodies cut in half looks really pleasing. It DEFINITELY looks alot better than Aria of Sorrow, and it looks better than Symphony of the Night.

So what's bad about the game? There are some very small annoyances, like alucard has only 2 specials yet he still switches them with R and uses the with Up+Y instead of one being used with R, theres also when you use something it'll be cancelled if you switch weapons/characters/inventory sets (Throw an axe with julius, switch to cross and axe disappears). Theres also Boss Rush mode, in which you kill all the bosses in the game in a row. They should've beefed up the earlier ones so they don't die from 2 hits of you're level 60 character.

Also annoying is that when you die (which you'll be doing lots of unless you're leveling too much for the hard bosses) the game forces you to sit through the "licensed by nintendo... made by konami" instead of just letting you do a quick load or taking you to the main menu instantly.

The biggest annoyance though is probably that some souls shouldve been evened out. The mandragora soul is probably the cheapest soul in the game, theres a soul that takes twice as much magic to use, yet it's slower, has worse range and does less damage (Great axe armor). It could've been more balanced than that. Also, the weapon specials could take a less magic, since they're so fun to use.

To sum it up, Right now this is the best DS game by far, the best castlevania game, and one of the best games ever made. Among my favorite 2d games, the only game I might like better than this is Donkey Kong Country 2.

9.3/10 - A must-have

PS: Deal with the typos.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/03/05