The three GBA games make clear strides in improving upon the last one. If you actually want to enjoy this I would suggest playing it before Aria of Sorrow and just completely skipping Circle of the Moon. This is basically if SOTN was on the GBA and for the time, SOTN on the GBA was cool. Really cool. But now that it's just another Castlevania game, that you can either emulate or play legally on your Switch, it's basically SOTN, but worse. You can probably play SOTN on your Switch if you try hard enough.

I do enjoy this game, my biggest gripe is not knowing what to do next. You can spend hours traversing the entire castle to find the one spot you need to be at. And this happens more than a few times. I never even knew you could teleport till I found a hint somewhere, so it was basically the end of the game when I finally did start teleporting.

This is relatively easy, probably moreso than Aria of Sorrow and I like that I'm not constantly killing enemies trying to get their abilities, as much as I found that aspect of Aria very cool, I like the simplicity of less FOMO. The bosses are just moving blocks that sometimes attack. There's a lot of them too. You'll need very little strategy for most of them and if you utilize your magic and special attacks, as well as maybe do a bit of grinding, you'll barely take a scratch.

By the time you reach the end of the game it's pretty hard not to be overpowered and by now if you don't know the best magic combos (or combo I should say, ahem, wind/cross) there might be something wrong with you.

Overall a solid game with a blah story, huge docking of points for constantly getting lost and having WAY too many dead ends that you can't pass till much much, much, later.

Oh yeah, just because they needed to place more random items to collect, there's a room that you can furnish. Weird side quest.

this is the worst kind of direct sequel. gameplay loop is essentially identical but it has almost nothing to do with the previous game story/continuity-wise.

nintendo has always been allergic to lore but there is no time this has been more obvious than this time around.

they completely tapped out on what was good and what was bad about botw and just made the same game with some added crafting mechanics that can be fun but arent very practical to the core gameplay.

I think it's time for me to give up on this one. I've tried it numerous times through the years and even got decently far into it once... but it's just not super compelling to me. For being a 3D game with 2D sprites it just doesn't look that great and all around it feels very... almost but not quite. Besides the OST, which may be my most listened to OST after Chrono Cross. It's like this inbetween of CT and CC (probably because it literally was made between them).

I've heard this was originally a FFVII pitch, and then a possible Chrono Trigger 2 at some point as well, and it does have a lot in common with CT, not just the the soundtrack composer.

Anyway, I think I'm going to abandon this as a game and watch a playthrough instead. Considering how inspired by Gnosticism I am in my own projects it seems like a necessity to at least know the whole plot.

Edit: Just collecting my thoughts here while I watch a play-through, but this very much feels like a game completely led by its narrative and everything about it is in support of that narrative. Basically, there are no overly frivolous gameplay aspects, they're all there for the story. This could very much just have been a novel. Not sure how I feel about that, but it is an interesting way to approach a game.

The pacing is also pretty slow and there's a lot of dialogue to not say so much. That feels like a pretty common Japanese poetic choice. A lot of battle scenes feel like 61 episodes of DBZ.

I don't know how to compare this to anything as I've never played anything like it, but the simplest descriptor would be "government simulator." Of course, placing it in modern times would probably make it boring, so it's in some space colony in the future with a bunch of aliens/etc.

There's no town-building aspects that might save something like this from monotony, it's basically a bunch of screens with portraits where you decide the "policies" for the day, which really just ends up being who to bribe next or who to assassinate. It has a very board game quality, as you can play with up to four people taking turns.

I get some Dune vibes but I haven't actually read Dune, it just seems inspired by it coming from someone that has a cursory interest and has seen some of the movies, that's about it.

Ultimately, this just doesn't seem like my type of game and it feels archaic now. Might have been interesting in 92 to someone else however. Big shrug.

I should have already played all the SOTN RPG-esque Vanias by now, considering how much I liked that particular one. Say what you will about grinding EXP, but adding it to a Metroidvania brings me much joy personally.

I tried playing most of these back around when they came out but I think I was just overwhelmed by how many there were, and the stories just never really grabbed me.

Still can't really say the story is very interesting, there's too many anime-isms , basically any kind of weird stuff without explanations or meh characterization. I'm sure that's just par for the whatever localization, which suffices but isn't much to write home about. Okay, I didn't beat it yet, but I'm not champing at the bit for more story, sorry.

Probably the best aspect to this is collecting monster abilities, albeit I still haven't figured out if it's random or you have to kill a certain amount. Probably somewhere in between. Anyway, GOOD GAME.

Edit: After beating it, my feelings pretty much remained unchanged the entire way through. That's perfectly fine. It's a very good game with a solid formula and decent story. It got pretty challenging at times but grinding a bit could usually solve that. I don't really want to 100% it, but I did get the "good" ending. Looking forward to Dawn of Sorrow.

Final note: there's a classical piece of music that's used here that was also used in Soul Blazer and going through that area feels very odd to me.