The Good:
- A significant improvement over HoD
- Fun souls mechanic
- Great music
- Engaging combat
- Fantastic map design
The Ok:
- Weird difficulty spike
- Soul drop rate is too low
The Bad:
- Not much
Conclusion:
Aria of Sorrow basically fixes every issue I had with Harmony of Dissonance, and is honestly pretty close to Symphony in terms of pure quality. In regards to the presentation, it looks great, and the music is infinitely better than HoD. The combat is closer to Symphony’s weapon-swapping mechanics, and it’s all bolstered by a creative Tactical Souls system, in which you can use abilities of enemies whose souls you’ve absorbed. While the souls don’t drop as often as they should, this largely makes for a fun combat system with a lot of builds to choose from. Soma’s movement also feels fantastic (although I do miss the dashes from HoD). By far the best part of the game though, is the map itself. I never once had to look up a guide to find my way, and the entire corridor system is quite intuitive in terms of remembering areas you can now access with each new upgrade. Pleasingly, there’s also a neat teleportation system, which frankly does wonders for backtracking. Honestly, my only significant criticism is that there’s a weird difficulty spike with one particular mandatory boss in the late game. It’s still doable, but it’s by far the hardest fight in the game (and it’s not even the final fight). Still, this was very good overall, and I’ll likely revisit Aria of Sorrow at some point in the future.
- A significant improvement over HoD
- Fun souls mechanic
- Great music
- Engaging combat
- Fantastic map design
The Ok:
- Weird difficulty spike
- Soul drop rate is too low
The Bad:
- Not much
Conclusion:
Aria of Sorrow basically fixes every issue I had with Harmony of Dissonance, and is honestly pretty close to Symphony in terms of pure quality. In regards to the presentation, it looks great, and the music is infinitely better than HoD. The combat is closer to Symphony’s weapon-swapping mechanics, and it’s all bolstered by a creative Tactical Souls system, in which you can use abilities of enemies whose souls you’ve absorbed. While the souls don’t drop as often as they should, this largely makes for a fun combat system with a lot of builds to choose from. Soma’s movement also feels fantastic (although I do miss the dashes from HoD). By far the best part of the game though, is the map itself. I never once had to look up a guide to find my way, and the entire corridor system is quite intuitive in terms of remembering areas you can now access with each new upgrade. Pleasingly, there’s also a neat teleportation system, which frankly does wonders for backtracking. Honestly, my only significant criticism is that there’s a weird difficulty spike with one particular mandatory boss in the late game. It’s still doable, but it’s by far the hardest fight in the game (and it’s not even the final fight). Still, this was very good overall, and I’ll likely revisit Aria of Sorrow at some point in the future.
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is a metroidvania era castlevania game that has perhaps the best balance of difficulty of the Advance collection games, it is easy in the beginning but towards the end there is enough of a difficulty to need mastering some enemy move patterns and tactics, yet there aren't too many unfair enemies or rooms (except maybe one room with petrifying enemies and conveyor belts that nearly instakill you). Music is awesome most of the time. Still a bit of grinding to collect monies and souls and whatnot, especially going for the best ending, but not too bad.
good