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.