Ever since the incredible success of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night back on the PS1, Konami has replicated its gameplay formula into nearly every subsequent iteration of the franchise, hoping to bring about another game as good as the legendary SotN. Even to this day, it hasn’t been able to do it. While the recent Game Boy Castlevanias are all absolutely brilliant, being, in my opinion, the best games on the little systems and coming within a hair’s breadth of being another SotN, when it comes to 3D, Castlevania seems to always fall flat on its face. From the N64 Castlevanias, widely regarded as being vile abominations that should be purged from this earth, to the mediocre PS2 Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, it seemed as if the franchise cannot exist in 3D.
Curse of Darkness is the newest Castlevania, out for both the PS2 and the Xbox, and Konami’s most recent crack at making a 3D Castlevania that doesn’t stink. Do they succeed? Well, I’m here to tell you that Curse of Darkness is a much better game than its predecessor, and the closest Konami has ever been to making a 3D Symphony of the Night.
I’d say this game falls in the category of Action-Adventure. Keeping with its tradition of being unreasonable and or stupid, the ESRB has rated the game M because it has pointy things which are used to poke monsters, and tomato juice which comes out of them upon doing so. As always, the scale is 1-10.
Story: 6
None of the Castlevanias have ever had a particularly awesome story, and this one’s no exception. It takes place during the time of the old Castlevania 3 for the NES. After Dracula’s defeat at the hands of the hero Trevor Belmont, the land is struck by a curse, which was placed by Dracula with his dying words. This curse causes humans to have… uh… evil emotions. Or something. Anyway, Dracula had two very special servants under his command, called Devil Forgemasters, who used their powers to create demons to supply his undead armies. However, one of those devil Forgemasters, Hector (that‘s you), betrayed Dracula after finding a girlfriend and tried to mend his evil ways. Dracula was defeated, and the other forgemaster, Isaac, was furious, and was sure that the only reason his master was defeated was because of Hector’s betrayal. So, to take revenge, he makes a sham trial, where Hector’s girl is accused of being a witch, and she gets burned at the stake. Hector is pretty upset about this, but since he gave up his powers, he couldn’t protect her. So… he swears to kill Isaac to get revenge, and follows him to Dracula’s abandoned castle. But to defeat Isaac, he will have to reawaken his dormant powers.
In any case, the story’s pretty much average, but the pretty well done cut scenes, as well as the good voice acting and the slightly intriguing parts here and there help bring the score up a bit.
Graphics: 8
On the one hand, the FMV cut scenes remind me of Final Fantasy, in that they have awesome graphics. The in-game graphics are good, but nothing special at all either. Honestly, it makes me think that the PS2 has reached its graphical peak, since I haven’t seen anything that much better than this in a while. One specific gripe is that some of the areas look a bit too similar.
Sound: 10
Ok. Whoever composed the music for this game deserves some candy. Seriously. I haven’t seen a game with music this consistently awesome in a long time. Curse of Darkness sports a soundtrack that is very similar in both style and quality to Symphony of the Night. In any case, I loved it. A big part of the reason I was excited to get to new areas was because I would get to hear a new cool song.
Gameplay: 7
All right, the meat of the Review. There’s a lot of things I want to discuss here. First of all, there’s one thing I’m glad to see: the level-up and experience system and character stats are back. This system was present in Symphony of the Night and the Gameboy Castlevanias, but Konami stupidly removed it from the 3D games because they thought it made the games too easy. Except, the games were still easy ANYWAY. In any case, removing this system proved to be a huge mistake, since, without exp, there was no real reason to fight monsters, aside from when it was required to open a door. Since Konami obviously doesn’t have the talent right now to make a battle system as deep as, say, Capcom’s Devil May Cry, players need other sources of motivation to kill the endless hordes of undead. It’s a good thing that they finally realized they can’t compete with the likes of pure action games such as DMC or God of War.
Secondly, I like the return of vastly different weapons, as well as equipment. However, now, instead of finding equipment out in the open, you have to craft it yourself. This is done through a simple system of combining items and materials. When you defeat monsters, they have a chance of dropping materials that can be used to create equipment for yourself. It’s a fun system, and it gives you even more motivation to kill enemies, so it’s welcome.
Another thing I liked is the addition of the Innocent Devil system. Innocent Devils are basically demons you obtain throughout the game, who act as familiars and help you by fighting along with you, or with support spells, depending on the Innocent Devil. These monsters gain exp and level up with you, they learn new skills as you kill enemies, and they even evolve. Kind of reminds me of Pokemon. When you kill monsters, they may drop crystals called Evo Crystals. Obtain a certain number of crystals, and your ID evolves. The difference though is that, unlike pokemon, IDs have many evolutionary paths they can take, which are affected by the type of weapon you use. If you use, say, a sword, monsters drop red crystals, and your ID evolves into something. But if you had been using an axe, the monsters would drop blue crystals and the ID would evolve to something else. Then, for every other evolution, you can choose a different weapon to get different further evolutions. What this equates to is even MORE reason to fight enemies, as well as a fun addition to gameplay.
That’s it for the cool features. Now let’s move on to the actual combat mechanics. In a word, they are decent. Like I said before, this game is by absolutely no means Devil May Cry when it comes to combat, since the combo system is rather simplistic. Even so, the controls are tight. I had heard some people say that Hector is unwieldy when he’s comboing, and that he becomes vulnerable when he’s busy doing a flurry of attacks. But these people stink and shouldn’t be listened to. They obviously don’t understand the art of frame canceling. By using the simple roll, you can cancel out of the recovery animations of attacks and avoid getting hit.
Here comes the part that brings the score down by a Lot, though. The camera. Ugh. The camera is way too close to Hector, and you can’t make it get farther back. It pulls back when you get in a fight, which is good, but I wish it was pulled back the entire game. How am I supposed to explore properly if I can’t even see very well? It took me a long time to get used to it, and I think it would have been an easy fix if only they’d given you an option.
Curse of Darkness also tries to emulate the style of level progression from Symphony of the Night, which in turn ripped it straight off of Metroid. You know, one big world with lots of places you can’t access until you get certain abilities from other places. Does it succeed? Yes and no. Instead of one big map, with many different areas that make it up, you get many different areas with their own individual map. This isn’t nearly as cool. The abilities you can get to access places on the map comes from the abilities of Innocent Devils. However, there really aren’t enough secret places like there are in the 2D games. They are few and far between, and usually very obvious. With that terrible camera, it’s no wonder they have to be obvious though. And herein lies the problem: level progression in Curse of Darkness feels a bit too linear.
Difficulty: 3
The game is obviously not made to be challenging. You can level up a lot to be stronger than your enemies, you have Innocent Devils that can heal you, and you have a ton of items at your disposal.
Length: 6
I clocked 22 hours after beating the game. That’s slightly above average for a 3D action game. I mean, no one was expecting this to be RPG length.
Replayability: 4
Because of the nature of Castlevania, its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than its combat system, the replay factor is on the low side. Once you’ve seen and done everything, there’s little reason to do it again immediately. Once you beat the game, you unlock Trevor as a playable character, which brings the score up a bit, but it’s still basically the same game, only Trevor has no equipment or Innocent Devils, so it isn’t as fun with him.
Fun Factor!: 8
While the camera can be a little frustrating, the game makes a surprisingly good attempt at the SotN gameplay with flaws that can be overlooked since the cool features I mentioned help to keep you interested and make the game a lot of fun throughout.
Overall: 8
All in all, Curse of Darkness turned out to be an awesome game. It just goes to show that Konami appears to be learning from its mistakes, and keeps trying to perfect the formula game after game. With this one, I’d say they made a very decisive leap towards that.
Sure, it may not be perfect, but it’s definitely worth a purchase.
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