So, uh, this game is actually pretty bad, but it's short, cheap, playable, easy and highly inspired by Symphony of the Night, so I didn't end up hating it and actually managed to enjoy some of it even though, make no mistake, almost everything here is weak at best though the ending might be so bad that it becomes confusingly brilliant and the game is cheap and short enough that you could rush it just to see the glory that is one of the least tasteful endings I've ever seen.
Combat is serviceable. You swing your sword, all of which behave the same, and do damage to baddies with a simple three-swing combo. Movement is fine and, of course, becomes more fun when you get the high and double jumps. The sprint one, also taken directly from SOTN, isn't as fun since your movement speed resets in the next room. The background and enemy graphics are fine to great, with some backdrops and enemies being very nice, but one of the most confounding aspects of this game is that the NPC sprites, of which there are four and all of them are important to the plot except the shopkeeper, are much worse than any of the other graphics. Why would you not spend more time on your main character than on the very pretty background moon?
The music is actually kind of awesome at times, though nearly all of it sounds like the developer asked the composer to make music that sounds exactly like rock/metal Castlevania covers. Not very original, but generally very nice. I also liked that there actually is a bit of true metroidvania in here, meaning it also has RPG mechanics like leveling up, a bestiary and loot drops. It's all small in scale, but it's nice that it's there since so few games in the genre actually live up to the "vania" part of the name.
Everything else, however, is quite bad. The map is an approximation of what Metroid and SOTN do, but doesn't quite get it right as one screen does not equal one map square in this game, and right from the start of the game, it's very noticeable that a room that's just a straight corridor on the map might be a multi-screen maze in the actual game. Enemy placement is basically always bad. I don't want to say for sure, but I think it may be possible that literally every single enemy in this game is annoying placed right on a ledge just so you end up jumping right into them before you can see them. Or, in some cases, there's a bat hanging from the ceiling, right outside of frame, which of course aggros and attacks you before you can see it, so at least there's some variation.
The bosses, man... I don't want to be mean to a game made by one person, but the bosses are really just laughable. I beat what was supposed to be one of the hardest bosses, Dark Hald, by simply stunlocking him with attack spam. I literally just stood there and hammered the attack button and he couldn't move and then died. The rest of the bosses were completely trivialized by the fact that I went back and explored as soon as I got the two jump abilities and ended up finding the ultimate sword before I think I was supposed to, and after that every enemy died in one attack combo and I could facetank every boss without even having to care about trying, including the final boss. The last phase of the final boss hovered, so I couldn't just stand there and spam, so instead I jumped and spammed and just drank the health potions I hadn't ended up using and won.
The writing has to get its own paragraph, because not only is it very pretentious and not very good (though side note: the game was not translated to english by the developer himself), I think this fucking game actually ends with the plot reveal that the evil wizard is actually your father, the whole game was a dream and the very end before fade to black sees your father throw you, the son, out of the room so he can be alone with his daughter? Then there's some pretentious text about how dreams are just an escape and you have to accept the reality of your life situation. Bro. Did this game really just end with the reveal that it's secretly about sexual abuse of children? You cannot be serious right now.
Where do I even go after that last paragraph? Did that ending really happen? Oh, well, as you can see by now, this is a pretty bad game that only gets a pass because it so shamelessly borrows from SOTN and because nothing in it is offensively bad, except maybe that ending. Even Dracula's, sorry I mean Claos', throne room has the same layout as Dracula's pad in Rondo and SOTN, so this is kind of like playing a bite-sized version of SOTN that's worse in every way and has an ending so bad it has to be seen to be believed. I didn't hate the game even though there is much to hate. One thing I do hate is to criticize a game made by one person this heavily, but the end credits said this game (including the preceding non-Rebirth version, I assume) took eight years to develop. At some point, I think you have to accept that you're not cut out for a certain job and I don't think that there's a brilliant game in this developer's future. Ironic, considering the game's ending about accepting your life as it is. Now I feel bad, but really, this game was just not worth nearly a decade of anyone's life.
Combat is serviceable. You swing your sword, all of which behave the same, and do damage to baddies with a simple three-swing combo. Movement is fine and, of course, becomes more fun when you get the high and double jumps. The sprint one, also taken directly from SOTN, isn't as fun since your movement speed resets in the next room. The background and enemy graphics are fine to great, with some backdrops and enemies being very nice, but one of the most confounding aspects of this game is that the NPC sprites, of which there are four and all of them are important to the plot except the shopkeeper, are much worse than any of the other graphics. Why would you not spend more time on your main character than on the very pretty background moon?
The music is actually kind of awesome at times, though nearly all of it sounds like the developer asked the composer to make music that sounds exactly like rock/metal Castlevania covers. Not very original, but generally very nice. I also liked that there actually is a bit of true metroidvania in here, meaning it also has RPG mechanics like leveling up, a bestiary and loot drops. It's all small in scale, but it's nice that it's there since so few games in the genre actually live up to the "vania" part of the name.
Everything else, however, is quite bad. The map is an approximation of what Metroid and SOTN do, but doesn't quite get it right as one screen does not equal one map square in this game, and right from the start of the game, it's very noticeable that a room that's just a straight corridor on the map might be a multi-screen maze in the actual game. Enemy placement is basically always bad. I don't want to say for sure, but I think it may be possible that literally every single enemy in this game is annoying placed right on a ledge just so you end up jumping right into them before you can see them. Or, in some cases, there's a bat hanging from the ceiling, right outside of frame, which of course aggros and attacks you before you can see it, so at least there's some variation.
The bosses, man... I don't want to be mean to a game made by one person, but the bosses are really just laughable. I beat what was supposed to be one of the hardest bosses, Dark Hald, by simply stunlocking him with attack spam. I literally just stood there and hammered the attack button and he couldn't move and then died. The rest of the bosses were completely trivialized by the fact that I went back and explored as soon as I got the two jump abilities and ended up finding the ultimate sword before I think I was supposed to, and after that every enemy died in one attack combo and I could facetank every boss without even having to care about trying, including the final boss. The last phase of the final boss hovered, so I couldn't just stand there and spam, so instead I jumped and spammed and just drank the health potions I hadn't ended up using and won.
The writing has to get its own paragraph, because not only is it very pretentious and not very good (though side note: the game was not translated to english by the developer himself), I think this fucking game actually ends with the plot reveal that the evil wizard is actually your father, the whole game was a dream and the very end before fade to black sees your father throw you, the son, out of the room so he can be alone with his daughter? Then there's some pretentious text about how dreams are just an escape and you have to accept the reality of your life situation. Bro. Did this game really just end with the reveal that it's secretly about sexual abuse of children? You cannot be serious right now.
Where do I even go after that last paragraph? Did that ending really happen? Oh, well, as you can see by now, this is a pretty bad game that only gets a pass because it so shamelessly borrows from SOTN and because nothing in it is offensively bad, except maybe that ending. Even Dracula's, sorry I mean Claos', throne room has the same layout as Dracula's pad in Rondo and SOTN, so this is kind of like playing a bite-sized version of SOTN that's worse in every way and has an ending so bad it has to be seen to be believed. I didn't hate the game even though there is much to hate. One thing I do hate is to criticize a game made by one person this heavily, but the end credits said this game (including the preceding non-Rebirth version, I assume) took eight years to develop. At some point, I think you have to accept that you're not cut out for a certain job and I don't think that there's a brilliant game in this developer's future. Ironic, considering the game's ending about accepting your life as it is. Now I feel bad, but really, this game was just not worth nearly a decade of anyone's life.