Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Oct. 29th, 2009 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhen they said this was the hardest of the Metroidvanias? They weren’t kidding. I beat Asia of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow without any assistance. I played Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance on emulators, so I used some save states here and there to save some time. For Portrait of Ruin, I only needed my Action Replay to beat the Whip’s Memory and the Death-Dracula fight.
This game? I barely made it to the third boss before the frustration got to me.
Video games are supposed to be fun. Now, don’t get me wrong, challenge can be fun. Games that are too easy can get boring quickly. But frustration definitely isn’t fun, and having to fight a three-stage boss (who can kill you in three hits at any stage) over and over again is frustrating.
The good: I like the glyph system, and I didn’t think I would like the “every attack uses MP” system, but it grew on me. The idea that you can free the villagers and complete their quests to unlock store items? That works for me. (Also, the hints to finding them all if you get the bad ending are an excellent addition.) I also thought having a world map, rather than just containing the game in Dracula’s castle, was a nice change of place.
The bad: Unfortunately, the other locations on that world map are mostly space-filler. Several of them are just long stretches full of monsters, and most of the others are large copy-paste environments. You visit the same cave segment below/forest above area no less than six times And the enemies are very quick to gang up on you—you need to go through every area slowly and carefully (even some that you’re revisiting later) and kill everything you see, because anything you miss will follow you and gang up to kill you dead. There’s very little learning-curve to new enemies, especially in the late game—when you see it, you need to figure out its attack pattern before you’ve been hit by it once, or it’s back to the last save point for you.
And then there’s the bosses. There are several of the person-sized, incredibly mobile ones that were so frustrating in the Sorrow and Ruin games; but the general theme is really best exemplified by the centaur boss in Dracula’s castle: You need to break the gems on his front legs, run between his legs when he rears up, use an axe glyph to destroy the cannons on his shoulders (because other weapons can’t reach them), run under his back legs when he jumps, break the gems on the back legs, jump on his back, and kill the eye on his neck. Each of these takes a lot of hits to accomplish. Fall off? Start over; everything but the shoulders regenerates. Get kicked three times? Game over, try again.
I found the plot cute for what it was; and the graphics, music, and controls were all on par with the other two DS games. But unless you like really nasty, NES-hard games, this one doesn’t measure up to those.
This game? I barely made it to the third boss before the frustration got to me.
Video games are supposed to be fun. Now, don’t get me wrong, challenge can be fun. Games that are too easy can get boring quickly. But frustration definitely isn’t fun, and having to fight a three-stage boss (who can kill you in three hits at any stage) over and over again is frustrating.
The good: I like the glyph system, and I didn’t think I would like the “every attack uses MP” system, but it grew on me. The idea that you can free the villagers and complete their quests to unlock store items? That works for me. (Also, the hints to finding them all if you get the bad ending are an excellent addition.) I also thought having a world map, rather than just containing the game in Dracula’s castle, was a nice change of place.
The bad: Unfortunately, the other locations on that world map are mostly space-filler. Several of them are just long stretches full of monsters, and most of the others are large copy-paste environments. You visit the same cave segment below/forest above area no less than six times And the enemies are very quick to gang up on you—you need to go through every area slowly and carefully (even some that you’re revisiting later) and kill everything you see, because anything you miss will follow you and gang up to kill you dead. There’s very little learning-curve to new enemies, especially in the late game—when you see it, you need to figure out its attack pattern before you’ve been hit by it once, or it’s back to the last save point for you.
And then there’s the bosses. There are several of the person-sized, incredibly mobile ones that were so frustrating in the Sorrow and Ruin games; but the general theme is really best exemplified by the centaur boss in Dracula’s castle: You need to break the gems on his front legs, run between his legs when he rears up, use an axe glyph to destroy the cannons on his shoulders (because other weapons can’t reach them), run under his back legs when he jumps, break the gems on the back legs, jump on his back, and kill the eye on his neck. Each of these takes a lot of hits to accomplish. Fall off? Start over; everything but the shoulders regenerates. Get kicked three times? Game over, try again.
I found the plot cute for what it was; and the graphics, music, and controls were all on par with the other two DS games. But unless you like really nasty, NES-hard games, this one doesn’t measure up to those.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-29 06:26 pm (UTC)I must respectfully disagree with you, sir. Give this one a run! Freeware game! Full of awesome old-school video game references that will make you laugh out loud, including an excellent Castlevania: Symphony of the Night parody.
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Date: 2009-10-29 09:21 pm (UTC)(I know, it's supposed to be Aria of Sorrow, I was just amused by the typo.)