+ Transition from 2D Metroidvania to 3D works
+ Story / Characters don't feel forced / silly
+ Secrets are hidden well
+ Sub weapon / Orb combination is fun to experiment
+ Soundtrack is stellar
+ Bosses are easy to deal with yet challenging
~ Mega Man stage Select
- Some areas suffer from dark aesthetics
- The Transition from Rinaldo's house to castle is so confusing and constantly a thing that shouldnt be
- Doppleganger boss fight is not warned
- Backtracking is a hassle
- Money / relic drops are too scarce
- Walter is a dumb name for a vampire

very decent gameplay and great presentation notably the character designs and soundtrack.

unfortunely the rest is just full of problems mainly the level-design which is pratically non-existent thanks to the large number of copy-pasted rooms.

the game is also fulled with meaningless backtracking through most of the areas Leon traverse and this combined with the already repetitive level-design and enviroments and you will encounter the most bland and tiring progression ever done in an game.

the narrative is fine and serves well to an origin story for the franchise though the dialogue is often bad but it has a charm that I like it.

at least the game is short enough to do an quick playthrough if you are lucky in getting to the right rooms in each area.

overall it is an good game if played in short bursts and if you can hold the repetition that come early in the game.

I wasn't expecting it to be good at all, to be frank... The OST is more than decent, the graphics look cool and dear god I love Leon Belmont!

The game is pretty much a 3D Metroidvania with DMC-like fighting but not as in-depth (Mostly just button mashing with a few unlockable combos)

The story is a pretty cool prequel and the characters are decent, and Leon also has some cool one-liners that I love even though this is not Resident Evil 4.

The controls feel a bit stiff, especially the platforming section (You know that part in the garden and the weird laser puzzle in the theatre)

last note, the final boss is stupidly hard I hate it

It's overall a decent game and worth playing if you love Castlevania! The Belmont Clan will hunt the night!

Lament of Innocence is the franchise's first attempt at a 3D metroidvania game. Was it a successful one? Eh, kinda.

Let's get the bad out of the way — this game is much worse at being a metroidvania than any of its 2D siblings. To me, one of the biggest strengths of the genre is the ability to explore and reach new areas whenever a new ability or movement option is obtained. It's a core element of the gameplay loop, and getting to move around and become familiar with said abilities is what makes it a favorite of mine. Unfortunately, this game does not have much in the way of that. Most of the time, progressing will be done by unlocking doors, usually by hitting a few switches scattered around whatever area the door is found in. Secrets are sometimes found by acquiring a key in another area, and there's less than a handful of secrets that can be accessed thanks to elemental whips.

In the same vein, exploring the castle often feels tedious. Leon is lacking in movement options, and there's so many long, often empty corridors. Some have enemies, but most are devoid of anything to do except break candles to replenish Leon's hearts. It's possible to use a Relic to sprint through these rooms, or use a variation of the Axe subweapon to dash through them, but they're hardly interesting to traverse in any capacity.

The game's other aspects are actually pretty good— the combat is satisfying, boss design is fun and rewarding. The pace at which new combos are unlocked is just right, and there's just enough time to get acquainted with new options without getting bored of them. The atmosphere, of course, remains a highlight: immersive environments, cool enemy designs, and a quality soundtrack, as is par for the course for Castlevania.

As a 3D action-adventure game, or as a hack and slash, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence is competent and even quite good, but its metroidvania elements hold it back a lot of the time. It's still good fun, but not for the reasons I usually like a metroidvania.

Mixing classic Castlevania items with the orbs is a really fun idea but the relics are a bit useless and the combat sometimes gets a bit repetitive. I took a big break in the middle of the game and it felt realy nice to come back to.
I enjoyed my first time through the areas but it becomes a bit tedious to move through when you come back for secrets. Being able to go through the areas in any order you want is always appreciated. I also think the bosses have a better connection to their respective areas compared to other games in the series,which is neat.
I think Leon's design and lines are really cool, he might be my favourite Belmont.
Overall I enjoyed my time but I don't think the game excells at anything.

Lament of Innocence tries to combine the unique exploration style of its own predecessors while introducing fast-paced hack 'n slash gameplay from contemporary titles like Devil May Cry. Unfortunately, it fails to do either very well.

The exploration is slow and stunted due to dull, repetitive areas; an unintuitive and often unhelpful fast-travel system; and slow, stiff character movement. These combine to make traversal (and backtracking, which you will do an excessive amount of if you wish to get any items or upgrades whatsoever) a chore. Additionally, Lament includes some of the most cryptic, unintuitive, and sometimes outright opaque progression in the entire series (yes, including Simon's Quest). Although much of it is not necessary for game completion, it will lock the vast majority of players out of the actually fun and interesting aspects of the game's combat altogether.

The combat, while not completely boring, is too simple and repetitive to remain interesting for the game's already stretched length of about 10 hours (more if you go for 100%). You start the game with almost no combos (a detriment to a game of its style), and even once you do progress enough to unlock more, you realize that only one or two out of the already extremely limited supply are actually worth performing consistently. The camera is fixed in each room, meaning that if it's in a bad angle, you have no choice but to try to move to another part of the room to see the action better. The Relic system is also laughably underdeveloped, having only 6 options to choose from in the entire game, 3 of which will ever be useful; of these 3, none are unlocked without copious amounts of backtracking and cryptic nonsense. The saving grace is the legitimately fun and interesting mixture of classic sub-weapons (Daggers, Axes, Holy Water, etc.) and Orb powers, which combine to grant Leon many exciting abilities. The system is almost exactly like that of Harmony of Dissonance, making it a welcome return from another troubled Castlevania title. Unfortunately, some of the best and most interesting of these are, once again, locked behind the game's poor exploration.

The music, while legitimately good, starts to grate on you once it has looped for the 100th time on a stage. For as long as you will spend in each individual area picking your way through the same enemies in each cookie cutter room, there is a distinct lack of different music for different floors, sub-areas, etc.

The story is a mess, pulled in two directions by its archetypal nature and its new series lore. The majority of Lament is an uninspired narrative consisting of a young knight, aided by an old mentor, on a quest to save his girlfriend from a vampire (notably, not Dracula). While almost nothing about Rinaldo the Alchemist and Walter the Vampire is particularly compelling, Leon makes for a simple but effective protagonist, and the twists (one of which is extremely obvious) actually make the game's narrative stand out from its peers a bit.

Overall, Lament of Innocence, whether due lack of care or (much more likely) budget and time constraints, is a half-baked entry in the Castlevania series, but it is still far from the worst.

un titulo corto, simple, que narra el comienzo de la saga Castlevania.
es un juego hecho con un presupuesto ajustado y se nota, a lo que si se ve que le pusieron mucha guita es al soundrack, que es espectacular.
el gameplay flojito, por suerte lo carrea mucho las sub-weapons. el látigo tiene pocos movimientos, que encima tardas mucho en desbloquear, mecánicas como el targeting o la posibilidad cancelar animaciones brillan por su ausencia y la camara no se puede controlar, quedando siempre en un ángulo extraño que además de molestar a la hora de navegar el mapa, no te permite disfrutar de los (pocos) entornos en 3D del juego.

aún con todas estas fallas no me pareció terrible, me entretuvo unas horitas y pude aprender al fin, entre tanta actuación exagerada, los orígenes del conflicto entre el linaje Belmont y el señor de la noocheee

Esse é um que estava há vários anos em meu backlog. Sou apaixonado por Castlevania, mas o fato de eu não ter tido um PS2 na época fez com que eu acabasse passando batido por esse que era uma das minhas maiores curiosidades por ser o primeiro jogo da linha do tempo, dando o pontapé na milenar luta entre os Belmont e Drácula.

Visualmente é um jogo bem bonito e bem caprichado, além de que tem toda uma história cinemática que eu acho sempre divertido, ainda mais nesse jogo que se passa num ponto tão importante da mitologia da série. A forma como a história é contada é bem brega, mas é um brega que eu gosto muito kk. Só achei que o lance do Drácula poderia ter sido melhor trabalhado até porque Symphony of The Night, que veio antes, conta uma história muito mais competente para explicar o ódio do vampirão pela humanidade.

As primeiras horas de jogo são muito gostosas com a exploração e as batalhas que são bem divertidas. No entanto, chega uma hora em que o jogo começa a ficar extremamente cansativo quando você percebe que os cenários são grandes demais, repetidos demais e com um personagem que anda bem devagar. Isso é um metroidvania, haverá bastante backtracking, e a soma desses fatores citados anteriormente faz com que o progresso seja bem chatinho e te desencoraja de fazer 100% já que os itens secretos nem são tão úteis assim para valer a pena esse vai e volta todo.

Lament of Innocence é um jogo bom, um feijão com arroz gostoso, mas é meio que só isso, mesmo. Valeu a pena por ter matado essa minha curiosidade do jogo.

Absolutely the weakest Igavania and it's not even close, bordering on funnybad but not quite getting there. Still pretty goofy, though! Glad I gave it a play on my way to getting through this whole series.

Regardless of the dramatic opening line, I'd still say Lament of Innocence has plenty of merit for being very much of-the-times in a way that doesn't feel excessive or notably to its own detriment while still remaining playable and put together enough not to be a buggy mess or a total snooze. From the fanfictiony unnecessary prequel lore to the very 2000s anime feeling script and almost comically uninspired overall design, it's got lots and lots of fun and funny shittiness that takes you back to a bygone era. If you don't give much of a serious shit about Castlevania lore, this one could probably give you some entertainment both for your brain and for your thumbs for a few hours.

However, my actual criticisms of the game are many, the weakness of the combat and the incredibly slow and clunky movement hindering a game that feels like it's trying nothing in particular to improve upon what its franchise had already been doing. The writing is about as bad as stated above and for me it does actually take the game down quite a lot cause I enjoy the lore the series had put together outside this game. There's a lot to say about what this game does either wrong or dumb, and it's hard to come up with anything it does right outside of the given good soundtrack this series is known for.

For combat, the whip does not feel intuitive nor good to use when playing; the combo strings the game provides are so simplistic that one quickly finds the dominant strategy for them and never lets go. The subweapons and their elemental combinations are pretty fun to mess around with like they were in Harmony of Dissonance, but with how overly potent the basic whip combos are in this game there's hardly a reason to bother using them outside of on occasion during boss battles. It almost resembles Symphony of the Night in that sense, but instead of having thrown a million combat mechanics at the wall and only seeing one or two stick, Lament of Innocence throws like three of them and only one of them half-sticks while the others slowly dribble down the bricks onto the ground.

Enemy design is almost random mechanically and does not feel balanced in the slightest, the developers' solution to Leon's braindead spin-to-win whip apparently being "what if we gave the bosses inconsistent super armor?" This leads to a surprisingly actually difficult final boss, a spike that feels both unwarranted and yet absolutely perfect for the horrendous combat balancing. There is no sense of satisfaction in defeating any enemies because the game does not incentivize you to do so at all for lack of leveling or meaningful strategic gain, instead forcing you into hallway or square-room encounters that you must clear in order for arbitrary red spikes of doom to disappear from the door you were wanting to get through. It's a mercy the game at least doesn't force you to do that more than once per spike room. Bosses don't really fare much better as they're quick and forgettable on top of being unfun with their armor making it impossible to at least take advantage of the broken combat against them.

The level design is genuinely hard to get through at times because of how monotonous and nonsensical it feels. So many rooms look and play nearly identical to each other that it's sometimes easy to get lost or forget where you're going. That's not because of the sheer size of levels - they're quite small, really - but because they're so dull and similar within themselves that it's hard to memorize layouts at all. The platforming challenges the game presents are laughable and the general lack of interesting secrets gives even less reason to bother looking closely at the colorless environments. It looks and feels like hallways and boxes without good enough set dressing to even be all that memorable. It's boring, propped up only by the music and the fact that there happens to generally be combat everywhere which you'll have to engage your thumbs and occasionally index fingers with.

As for the Castlevania staples, I believe the character designs are pretty lacking in this one, too. Outside of exactly death, every character including the bosses look like some of the worst this series has put out, particularly in the SotN-onward era. The models also tend to look really weird and uncanny in an unfinished sort of way. However, the other overall series staple - the soundtrack - is awesome as is standard. That side of things certainly helped me get through the game at a nice clip, fueling my flow even during the more dull parts.

While I do find the lore and writing of this game entertaining in its own campy and anime way, I do find that it generally weakens the overall lore and built-up world the series had up until this point as well as into the future. While some entries do little to advance the overarching plot such as Order of Ecclesia or Harmony of Dissonance, at the very least they are inoffensive.

Lament of Innocence by comparison does almost too much, and none of it is very good. If anything it's a blemish that due to its importance also affects the whole rest of the series. The Dracula origin story is not really needed to make the character any more compelling and to a degree makes Soma Cruz's later exploits all the less mystical and almost a little awkward. The Vampire Killer didn't really need explaining (especially with how contrived the circumstances of its conversion into the VK from the Whip of Alchemy are ingame), and the actual character motivations and plot beats are thrown together almost comically sloppily. In the context of the game, for example, Mathias - a key player in the plot - has so little screentime or presence that the player might as well have forgotten about him before the final scene.

There's a distinct weakness in the character this game is attempting to give the early Belmonts and Dracula, which I find pretty silly considering seemingly the whole point of the game is doing so in a retroactive sense. Out of everyone in the game, only Rinaldo seems to be treated decently well, but that's hardly enough to justify everything else. Somehow even the main character, Leon, is about as compelling as any of the NES-era Belmonts. Hell, he might even be less so if we're speaking relatively.

I will say that despite my very low rating for this game, I did have fun playing it. Sometimes. It's just that it had a lot of bad shit to outweigh any good things I could say about it and then some, and even when considering the era it was released in it still barely scratches the surface of mediocre. I at least got into flow at times thanks to the music and braindead nature of most combat, but the latter's less praise and more an observation of misfortune (that'd be a cool Castlevania game subtitle now that I think about it).

Playing Lament of Innocence this day made me want to just play a completely different Castlevania game for its whole runtime, though it was at least short and silly enough that I didn't regret spending time on it (not to mention, again, the brilliant music). Maybe I should finally go back to 64, been meaning to finish that one up. Now that I'm up to game #1000 the world is my oyster.

Anyway, this game's probably worth a skip unless one is into the sorts of campy old anime quirks and early '00s action game design this one reeks of. I doubt that many people who play through the Igavanias play this one, but still. Gotta put that out there. Just as Sara wished, nobody should ever again suffer the same fate a player of this game does.

This game is pretty decent, but I think you have to get the correct mindset first to enjoy this game.

If played as a normal action game, this game might be decent, kinda repetitive, but still fun. Combo can get repetitive but it has a nice feeling to it. It also has a bit of simple puzzle to solve. Bosses are good, but not great, most of them are easy and in fact I actually only died once to a boss and that's to a super boss.

If played as a metroidvania (which this game is kinda), then it's pretty bad. The backtracking for item is abysmal, there's no teleport in between area so you have to walk/run back and forth. There's a teleport item which will either takes you to the starting area (of the entire game) or to the last save point, but they cost money.
Not to mention that walking speed feels a bit too slow for how big the map can be.
The cherry on top is that the optional item isn't even that useful or fun most of the time, there's ONE item that I like which is wolf's foot that can make you run and jump faster, and as far as I know, is the only ability that is essential in getting some optional items (apart from straight up key).

To sour the game even more, to use the wolf's foot (and any other RELIC), you need mana, but mana doesn't recover automatically when you go to a save room. You have to either use item or perfectly block an enemy attack (which is almost useless when dodging is a lot easier).
So... I barely use the wolf's foot anyway, or any other relic for that matter.