I’m going to start by saying that I’m old. The Nintendo 64 came out when I was in college and I was too cool for kiddie Nintendo and their Fisher Price bullshit! So there’s a pretty big gap in my gaming history because I didn’t really get back into their stuff until the Wii launch. I had a DS before that but didn’t play much.

I missed a lot of Castlevania. For a long time SotN was the last one I played, but I was always curious about those six handheld Castlevania games. I’m not into the 3D games at all, mostly because the only one I ever played was that abysmal N64 entry. However I always loved the old 2D games so I picked up the Advance Collection on Switch and off I went.

A major gripe that I see with this game is the double tap to dash but that didn’t bother me at all since I was using a Switch Pro Controller. I enjoyed the music and the exploration and the whole Metroidvania thing. Get power ups to further explore the castle. That old chestnut.

I guess the biggest downside for me was that at times I felt this game was a bit punitive. That zombie dragon boss, the last boss, getting to another end game boss. There was some pain in here that I leaned on rewinds and save states in the collection for, and had I been playing without them, I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the game as much as I did. There’s an interesting magic system that I engaged with a bit but many of the cards never dropped for me and I wasn’t farming them.

All said, I enjoyed the game, but I’m not interested in Magician Mode. As much as I enjoyed it, I think I understand why I’ve read that this is the weakest entry. Looking forward to playing the other five portable games at some point. Maybe we will get a DS collection but who knows with Konami.

Contrast how I felt at the end to when I finally played Rondo of Blood, which I’ve now finished multiple times. I couldn’t wait to replay that game as Maria, but I’m fine setting this down and moving on. Worth playing it you like Metroidvanias but not my favorite.

Good things:
The DSS card feature is cool, gives you a build variety bigger than in elden ring
Bad things:
1. Literally anything that is not a [heart/mana/hp]-increasing item must be farmed. consumables, armor, accessories, even the DSS cards themselves must be farmed. and sometimes the answer to which card drops from who may not make any sense.
2. 10 hours feel like 40 for some reason, can't tell why
3. a bit too much door-like obstacles, which makes it difficult to keep track of which new paths are unlocked

I don't think I've ever turned around on a game quite like I did with Circle of the Moon. It frankly makes a terrible first impression, with stiff controls and an impossible poison filled hallway. I hated it so much that just 15 minutes in ! gave up and played the other 2 GBA Castlevania games, along with Dawn of Sorrow first, hoping to put this off as long as possible. But, upon returning to this game, I grew to really enjoy it. It's not perfect of course, the knockback is still really irritating, there's a boss or two without a save point near enough, the bosses aren't great, and of course the controls are still a bit clunky, but it's a genuinely great game. It's shorter and a lot more condensed than the other two GBA games, which I personally prefer, and I'd even say it has the best music out of all of them. It has an incredibly cohesive map that's fun to navigate, and the more linear structure combined with its smaller size makes it less irritating to get lost in. The moment to moment gameplay is just really fun. However, all of those little faults drag it down to the point that I don't think I'll be revisiting it, but I'm glad I had my one playthrough.

The worst of the Metroidvania Castlevanias by far in my opinion. I gave up playing this one towards the end because I just wasn't having fun. There are three major problems with this game: Sluggish movement, Low drop rates for the cards, and obnoxious enemies. There are romhacks to fix the first two problems, if you need to play this one for completion. If you want a good Metroidvania with a whip-wielding protagonist, try Portrait of Ruin or just playing Symphony of the Night with Richter (though you need to beat the main story to do that). Not sure about Harmony of Dissonance, I need to replay that one to see.

Finished on April 27th, 2024

Played this on the Steam Deck through the Advance Collection but- I like this box art more.

Overall this is a fine enough start to the GBA games- it being on a smaller handheld and not having Igarashi on board would make this game attempting to hold up to SotN's quality a monumental effort. But, for it being a release title for the handheld I can imagine most fans were probably sated by it.

In 2024 however a lot of issues feel that much more glaring as CotM's main gameplay feature: the DDS cards kinda throw a wrench into my expectations for the experience- namely its fusing with the RPG mechanics of the usual igavania. It feels as though you're expected to grind- grind on monsters that hold the cards that you dont yet have. Partially to make sure you're up to snuff for the next section of the castle and partially because a new card opens up a slew of new combinations with each card you obtain...but how good some of these new powers are varies wildly. It gets even more peculiar nearing the end of the game when some cards get hidden away in prior boss rooms and the battle arena- the completionist in me wanted to nab every card but I was not willing to sit through the tedium of
->summoning thunderbird on Lilith twice
->Leave room and repeat
->wait a minute or three so your MP refills
->repeat for 10 or so levels
Like i COULD but then you'd just be entering the battle arena several, several times to get the cards anyway- I just wanted to get a move on.

The DDS cards are neat and all but too many of them feel too samey for me to really want to commit to them. Some of them unlock new weapon types to dish out, some of them give elemental attributes to your whip, some allow you to summon- its pretty great at first but mostly I just stuck to a handful of these combos. It also feels weird considering how these feel as though they're trying to replace other mechanics? Like item drops? I swear I barely had any potions or heart items drop throughout, so mostly I stuck to the healing combo i mentioned earlier which is suitable but it just felt- odd, idk. No shops, no currency just the one card combo you could potentially miss out on.

Some of the bosses are pretty tedious (Death, buddy, what happened to you?) and the castle isnt all too interesting visually. It does become a bit more fun to explore as you hit the end of the game and get the Roc's feather, allowing a long, vertical jump up to cut through towering sections of the map and even playing a fun role in the final boss.

Its fine for the first handheld (not?)-Igavania title, although much of this traversing of Dracula's castle feels bogged down one half being a more rudimentary progression of unlocking your movement abilities and the other half being this momentum breaking grind for your combative flairs in the DDS system.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was released as a Game Boy Advance launch title. And developer Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe’s swan song, for the subsidiary was dissolved the following year. The game kicks off with the protagonist Nathan and his partners walking in on Camilla’s revival of Dracula. Their attempt to interrupt ends with mentor Morris being held as sacrifice as Nathan and Morris’ son, Hugh, plummet down a long shaft to the castle’s underground. The two rivals split up and the player takes control of the whip-wielding Nathan, who leisurely strolls and whips his way past bomb-throwing skeletons fire-spitting bone heads. That is, until you locate the Dash Boots, so Nathan can finally start exploring in earnest.

Circle of the Moon aims to balance traditional Castlevania with Metroidvania-inspired exploration. In addition to your traditional sub-weapons it introduces the Dual Set-up System (DSS). Combining two cards, dropped by enemies, results in a magic enhancement. Sadly, it’s poorly implemented. It relies heavily on RNG with low drop-rates and no hints as to which enemy could potentially drop what card. I finished with only half the cards but also with 23 Leather Armors, which served no purpose as there’s no means to exchange redundant items for money or, say, cards. The game also ramps up its difficulty fast in the second half of the game, mostly by throwing hordes of evolved (recoloured) enemies at you. Boss fights aren’t exactly the cherry on each area’s cake, either. Half of them float around, sparsely animated, firing off projectiles while you dodge and facepalm for losing the Cross sub-weapon yet again.

Conclusion: Circle of the Moon offers a solid but uninspired Castlevania experience. Some unfortunate choices in its design leaves a lot of potential untapped and it might’ve been a great entry in the series with a little more budget (and perhaps love) from Konami’s headquarters.

I tried to play and finish the game couple of times but there are some very interesting choices that stop me from enjoying and finishing the game. I don't like to be overly negative especially around my darling series Castlevania.
Movement you know is suppose to be the last thing that is annoying or tedious and sadly it is tedious in this game. Probably my least favorite out of all three GBA games.
Again i seem to be in the minority when it comes to this game maybe it wont be annoying to you but i recommend playing the romhack with auto sprint enabled which introduces its own problems but oh well.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon is weird. On one hand, it’s an impressive launch title for the Game Boy Advance that successfully captures the scope of Symphony of the Night on a handheld system. On the other hand, it completely fails to live up to SotN in many ways. On a third hand that I grew after swimming too close to the power plant near my house, it’s still pretty fun despite its flaws.

I’ll just get this outta the way: the story is practically nonexistent. Like, it’s technically there, but it’s so sparse and minuscule in the grand scheme of things that it’s barely worth mentioning.

Anyways, gameplay! The map design, while a little basic, is still pretty fun to navigate. As with every other Castlevania game of this era, it’s a blast to go back to old areas with new items to unlock more items and power up your character. There’s also a lot of breakable walls that lead to secret rooms, which is a great nod to the Classicvania games that encourages thorough exploration. Very fun stuff.

The Dual Set-up System (DSS) is a great idea, albeit with flawed execration. Throughout the game, you collect these tarot cards that grant Nathan (the protagonist, who surprisingly isn’t a Belmont) different abilities when combined together. This system is, indeed, as awesome as it sounds, but unfortunately, card drops are rare and entirely dependent on RNG, which has led to much frustration for many players. That being said, I got lucky, so I ended up with some pretty useful card combos (my favorite is the Jupiter-Salamander fireball circle).

The RPG elements feel neutered, especially compared to Symphony. There’s no shop, meaning that you’ll end up stockpiling useless items, and potions are incredibly hard to come by (they’re also basically useless since they only refill like 20 HP). Leveling up is a pain in the ass and takes way too long, with the EXP requirements becoming ludicrously high (upwards of 50,000 to 100,000) by the endgame.

However, all of that pales in comparison to Circle of the Moon’s biggest flaw: those FUCKING controls. Specifically, you have to double-tap in order to dash. I cannot even begin to describe how unnatural this feels, and I never got used to it. Walking isn’t an option, as Nathan’s base speed is ridiculously slow and terrible for combat. You need to dash, but it’s just so fucking awkward and unintuitive. The controls were one of Igarashi’s biggest problems with this title, and I can see why.

But Circle of the Moon is still a fun game that’s worth checking out, especially for Castlevania fans, so I don’t wanna end this review on a sour note. Instead, I’ll point out that, as with nearly every other title in this series, Circle of the Moon’s soundtrack is a banger. It mostly consists of remixed tracks from previous games, but damn do those remixes go hard, especially for a GBA launch title. Do your ears a favor and take a listen.

This game has a really solid gameplay. The combat was substantially improved from SotN and the addition of the DDS system made it fresh from beginning to end even if getting the cards themselves can be a little tiresome. However, the level design is pretty mediocre: rooms tend to mostly spam you with annoying enemies, which wouldn't be so bad if the placement of save points wasn't pretty much always terrible, making you lose a lot of progress. Combine that with cards with a low chance of dropping and you get a pretty frustrating loop. Alongside level design, the castle itself is very forgettable with most areas being rehashes from SotN. On a final note, the story and music were pretty good with special mention to Awake and Proof of Blood (which is by far the best Dracula theme so far)
All-in-all, fun game with a lot of frustrating parts that make its new ideas not flourish to their best potential.

Man I don't know what everyone else saw in this game that I didn't but I just hated my overall time playing this one. The map design is so bland and boring, the movement is so limited, the card system is a neat idea if you can actually get enemies to drop the damn things. And while it is their first attempt at a metroidvania on the GBA, it really felt like it. The removal of currency and having no game shop made this game unnecessarily hard. If I weren't playing this one on the emulator I don't think I would've beaten it. I filled out like 90% of the map and even by the end I was struggling. I hear people really enjoy the card system but I could never get these damn things to drop. I feel like drop rates in this game in general are so rare and scuffed that It doesn't matter how well you play, you'll reach a bullshit section due to how underleveled you are and don't have the appropriate armor to take care of the threat.

Also, you can ONLY use a whip in this game, Idk man that's just lame, I get it, he's considered to be a belmont but this just makes him less fun to play as. I think the devs may have realized this so for Aria you actually play as a non belmont, and further down the line if you do play as one they give you the option to use different weapons like with Jonathan in Portrait of Ruin.

Yeah I didn't like this one, at all, I wish I could see what all the 3-4 stars people saw in this one but as it stands this is my least favorite metroidvania i've played.

I'm tired.

Let's play armchair game designer, because lord knows we don't have enough of them on here.

Before you can run, you must walk, and boy does Nathan Graves enjoy walking. Nathan just adores going on a stroll in Camilla's castle while his master's getting his toenails ripped off in preparation for being slaughtered in a satanic ritual. Mr. Graves wouldn't know how to run even if I slapped his dump truck ass with the world's most painful block of wood. It's a godsend that Camilla's basement houses the very shoes he needs to be able to find the joys of exercise again after he forgot how to sprint when Count Dankula played his Trap Hole card in the introduction scene. One must wonder how long it would've taken if Drac's minions didn't make such a fuck up as to leave shoes for Mr. Graves to wear for his aching strolling feet. Even with these shoes Nathan only knows how to barrel forward with wanton disregard for his own being. Alucard had it figured out already, just run with care. That's all you gotta do. For Nathan though? Only two speeds exist. Tortoise, and drunken hare riding on a Kawasaki Ninja.

The input for running in this game is bad enough with requiring me to dash dance on the dpad and kill my thumbs, but Nathan's whip attack is noticeably sluggish compared to past Classicvania outings. It may not be noticeable at first, but try ducking and whipping and go back to playing as Simon in any of the past games and you'll definitely feel it. Nathan can jump like a stiff pong paddle and can even wall jump, and trust me I'm proud of him for being able to do so, but he should stick to his day job. Wall jumping in this is automated for at least two seconds as Nathan pauses on the wall and propels himself into the direction of enemy fire that sends him careening back down the pit that he was trying to make his way up from. You will encounter this scenario a lot, I assure you, especially with Circle of the Moon's obsession with slap dashing Armor enemies everywhere with annoying attacks that can bop you from the other side of the screen. No joke, I had a moment where I thought I was hitting an Ice Armor enemy in the underground waterway safely, only to get a very pleasant surprise in the form of another spear flying from off screen and stabbing me through the adam's apple thanks to the second Ice Armor that was behind him.

The primary system is collecting some shitty Yu-Gi-Oh cards and playing Blackjack with yourself to combine two of them and give yourself some form of power up, which could range from boring effects like your whip getting an elemental bonus, or actual cool shit like turning into a bone-throwing skeleton that dies in one hit. Unfortunately, the card for turning into a glass jawed skeleton is about 95% into the game and requires killing a very specific candle enemy that requires backtracking to a who-gives-a-shit area, and kindly asking it to drop the damn card sometime this week. This is where I get to bitch about the worst part of Circle of the Moon besides Nathan's completely useless movement, and it's the outrageous drop rates. That card that I'd need for the aforementioned skeleton transformation? The drop rate is zero point four fuckin' percent. That doesn't just effect the cards either. Health items? What are those?!

Seriously, I went for hours playing this game and didn't think healing was even a thing in Circle of the Moon besides the absurdly paltry potions that give a measly 20 hit points back, or getting to one of the sparse save points that fully heals you. Hell, you don't even get healed after boss fights. I beat probably six bosses before a piece of meat suddenly dropped from an enemy, where I double-taked and went back just to stare at it for a while. There is not a shop to speak of either, shopkeepers aren't welcome in Circle of the Moon. No buyable health items for you to help with the horrendous onslaught of tedium, but you can go ahead and enjoy all those completely useless armors you get to lug around on your person. Sure is a hard game we got here, would be nice if I could have some items, but Dracula is against formal goods trading.

Circle of the Moon is about inconvenience. It inconveniences you with movement that isn't convenient for the challenge that is set up for you as it would be for past entries. The only way to make your pathetic movement less inconvenient is to find cards inconveniently hidden away in an unknown enemy's back pocket that could potentially make certain encounters flat out trivial, like the normally problematic ice element in the underground waterway, or Dracula's nigh-impossible to dodge meteor attack in the final battle. It's all an inconvenient excuse to grind if you lack information, which this game inconveniently gives you none assuming you're not playing the Advance Collection version, which was the only convenient bit from my experience. Thanks M2.

It took me about three months to finish the save file I started on the Advance Collection a ways back after I completed Harmony of Dissonance and it's toilet noises, and it's mindbogglingly to me to realize that it was around last Christmas that I replayed and finished Aria of Sorrow again on the same collection. It wasn't necessarily a skill issue, it was a thumb issue from the horrendous dash input, and my complete apathy to this game's entire philosophy of wanting to train me on it's solitaire system only for the battle arena to give me the middle finger, and take that same system away in the ultimate show of disrespectful inconvenience. It was optional, sure, but it's existence is more than enough to make me want to transition into a volcanic state. It was even more aggravating to find out that Konami apparently bumped the experience requirements up for the western releases, thus demanding me to update the list for all the times they fucked us in the ass. I needed a lot of Picross breaks, and apparently a detour to that Peach game I didn't care about.

It kinda goes without saying, but the thought of replaying this on original hardware with the bad GBA screen, no suspend save, or in-game overlay hints of what enemies are carrying cards is less appealing to me than taking an epilator to my ballsack. I'll give it a pity star for Dracula's final boss design, I guess. I guess.

Thus concludes armchair game designer session, if you enjoyed what you've read, please like, comment, subscribe, ring the dingaling, and maybe sing me a nice song.

I'm going to bed now. Goodnight.

hoooooonkmimimimimi.

+Nathan Graves dump truck ass
+Rakugakids reference
+Yo Camilla call me
+Proof of Blood

-Nathan Graves dump truck ass
-Sinking Old Sanctuary?! More like Stinking Old Sanctuary!
-Why is my hair not as nice as Hugh's
-Where's my burrito