This is definitely the best Metroidvania I have ever played. Almost everything about this game is prefect: the castle is fun to navigate, and because of the portrait feature, it's chunked up into manageable sections that make getting lost nearly a non issue, Many of the enemies are fun and challenging, the swap system works super well and is balanced, and the locations are all interesting and well thought out. The only things keeping this from a 10 are the fact that the bosses can still be a little much (it is a castlevania game after all) and the awkward writing and voice acting ruin parts of the (admittedly limited) story. Other than that, the game is nearly flawless.

Now that I’ve played nearly all of them I feel pretty comfortable saying this is the best Igavania. Making a sequel to Bloodlines where you’re able to switch between the two protagonists on the fly was truly an inspired choice, and having these two distinct personalities with the baggage from Bloodlines made me actually care about the story in one of these games for the first time. The setting rocks too, opting to make Dracula’s castle more of a hub that contains Mario-64-ass paintings that you can travel through to more varied locales than this franchise has had since the move to the Igavania style. I really find it difficult to find any fault in this one outside of some endgame grinding I needed to do, but that’s pretty par for the course at this point. Shoutout to that Yuzo Koshiro track too, the rest of the soundtrack is great but it’s a real standout.

I very much liked this one. It's another Igavania, so it's marginally better than the others in some ways, and marginally worse in others. The dual characters were particularly appealing, and the visuals of the sub areas were some of my favorite in the series.

The only interesting thing I want to talk about is the translation? What happened? It's just so obviously bad. It's not like there's even a high bar for this kinda thing in the series, it's just baffling stilted. It's kinda charming because of it. Why does Jonathan respond "No problem." to like half of the dialogue.