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Dawn Of Sorrow & Order Of Ecclesia
6 months ago
General
DragonStuff.exe has begun.
Beat those two last week, close to 100% as I could get without going insane lol.
Started with Dawn Of Sorrow. Starts fun, nice and responsive!
It's swiftly sidelined by forced DS gimmicks like using the touch screen for various gameplay elements -one of which was changed to QTE button presses, thank fuck. That then dovetails into the game having a LUCK stat that instead of working and boosting drop rates, has such a horrid formula that you get an approximately 0.01% boost in your luck per every 8 LUCK. Your max is 99. You can see the problem lol. The game relies on obtaining souls to use their attacks and makes you spend souls to craft stronger weapons. Some souls are incredibly rare (This enemy has 50 HP, takes 1 damage unless you back attack it with a special soul, it spawns in only 3 locations and has a drop rate of 1% or so, so have fun hitting it 25 times repeatedly for one attempt), and some souls required for weapons are...run-unique boss weapons. So you have to NOT Craft any souls to be able to spawn a special ring saying you got them all in the game, or you're locked out of that one lol.
That is to say, the design is kind of messy. One of the earliest, most useful enemies, the Peeping Eye (Lets you see breakable walls) has horrific drop rates even though it's a super basic, simple, common ass enemy. I took 242 attempts to get my first soul. Game laughed at me, came through that same screen later, killed it OMW through and it dropped a 2nd one >.>;.
It's certainly enjoyable if you just go through it all regularly, but the enjoyment might start to taper off. A decent translation of core 2D Castlevania to DS with some issues.
Order Of Ecclesia reverted to a different art style after Aria\Dawn's complaints of being too "Animesque" (??). I don't know, it looks FF12 as hell now with weird hairstyles and uh whatever.
Gameplay wise, your MP bar is a stamina bar : You attack with glyphs you find or absorb from enemy attacks within the mp bar limit. Don't attack for 1 to 1,5 sec and it rapidly refills.
To be honest, I'm not really a fan of this. The "True ending" is something you'll go towards naturally if you explore anyway, and on reaching it it was a whole lot of "Oh, well. Okay, bye" . I've rarely been blueballed by a game story-wise but this absolutely does it. The fake closure it attempts to give you isn't adequate enough.
On a gameplay level, this is the toughest Castlevania I've ever played. You don't start out with good runes, but you do have annoying enemies for the first half of the game, first and foremost, attacking you.
You have no range? Have some pokey spear enemies! You can't quite move the same underwater? Have this worm enemy that is awkward to hit and inflicts poison (Sapping hp slowly and tanking your stats) if it touches you! Fuck off with that. The pinnacle if this just might be the Lighthouse boss - a cool idea actually - of a giant crab you have to avoid as you damage it so it breaks floors until you go up and crush it with the elevator. The problem is he's underneath you and you have almost nothing that can attack straight down except the (for me) 5 damage axe. It...took a while.
Another huge downgrade in the gameplay department is that it consists of small areas you visit - about 12 to advance the plot. There are 2 challenge locations (1 platforming challenge option testing timing and sense and 1 cave with hard as fuck enemies in annoying formations doing insane damage), and one major location - the true ending unique location that feels more like one BIG area.
The problem is you go from little ho hum locations that take a few minutes to clear to that whole mess where you are tasked with finding 3 sigils, going to the middle to use it, yadda yadda. It has no idea what it is, or wants to be.
I appreciated some parts of it, but I'm mostly just frustrated it was designed to be so fucking annoying on almost every front.
Glyphs are a neat idea. Except you take *quite a while* to get upgraded glyphs so your crap attack power can move forward, as well.
If you're emulating it with save\load states, fine. If you like to be annoyed, fine. I wouldn't honestly recommend this game to pretty much anyone however. While it's not bad, it's definitely malicious in some design elements.
Oh, did I mention some chests randomly appear each time you enter a location to explore it?
And that those chests at 10% can be rare chests?
Or that some ones are just *open palm gesturing* hidden and you need to wear a super weak hat or randomly slide where they are to find them?
Started with Dawn Of Sorrow. Starts fun, nice and responsive!
It's swiftly sidelined by forced DS gimmicks like using the touch screen for various gameplay elements -one of which was changed to QTE button presses, thank fuck. That then dovetails into the game having a LUCK stat that instead of working and boosting drop rates, has such a horrid formula that you get an approximately 0.01% boost in your luck per every 8 LUCK. Your max is 99. You can see the problem lol. The game relies on obtaining souls to use their attacks and makes you spend souls to craft stronger weapons. Some souls are incredibly rare (This enemy has 50 HP, takes 1 damage unless you back attack it with a special soul, it spawns in only 3 locations and has a drop rate of 1% or so, so have fun hitting it 25 times repeatedly for one attempt), and some souls required for weapons are...run-unique boss weapons. So you have to NOT Craft any souls to be able to spawn a special ring saying you got them all in the game, or you're locked out of that one lol.
That is to say, the design is kind of messy. One of the earliest, most useful enemies, the Peeping Eye (Lets you see breakable walls) has horrific drop rates even though it's a super basic, simple, common ass enemy. I took 242 attempts to get my first soul. Game laughed at me, came through that same screen later, killed it OMW through and it dropped a 2nd one >.>;.
It's certainly enjoyable if you just go through it all regularly, but the enjoyment might start to taper off. A decent translation of core 2D Castlevania to DS with some issues.
Order Of Ecclesia reverted to a different art style after Aria\Dawn's complaints of being too "Animesque" (??). I don't know, it looks FF12 as hell now with weird hairstyles and uh whatever.
Gameplay wise, your MP bar is a stamina bar : You attack with glyphs you find or absorb from enemy attacks within the mp bar limit. Don't attack for 1 to 1,5 sec and it rapidly refills.
To be honest, I'm not really a fan of this. The "True ending" is something you'll go towards naturally if you explore anyway, and on reaching it it was a whole lot of "Oh, well. Okay, bye" . I've rarely been blueballed by a game story-wise but this absolutely does it. The fake closure it attempts to give you isn't adequate enough.
On a gameplay level, this is the toughest Castlevania I've ever played. You don't start out with good runes, but you do have annoying enemies for the first half of the game, first and foremost, attacking you.
You have no range? Have some pokey spear enemies! You can't quite move the same underwater? Have this worm enemy that is awkward to hit and inflicts poison (Sapping hp slowly and tanking your stats) if it touches you! Fuck off with that. The pinnacle if this just might be the Lighthouse boss - a cool idea actually - of a giant crab you have to avoid as you damage it so it breaks floors until you go up and crush it with the elevator. The problem is he's underneath you and you have almost nothing that can attack straight down except the (for me) 5 damage axe. It...took a while.
Another huge downgrade in the gameplay department is that it consists of small areas you visit - about 12 to advance the plot. There are 2 challenge locations (1 platforming challenge option testing timing and sense and 1 cave with hard as fuck enemies in annoying formations doing insane damage), and one major location - the true ending unique location that feels more like one BIG area.
The problem is you go from little ho hum locations that take a few minutes to clear to that whole mess where you are tasked with finding 3 sigils, going to the middle to use it, yadda yadda. It has no idea what it is, or wants to be.
I appreciated some parts of it, but I'm mostly just frustrated it was designed to be so fucking annoying on almost every front.
Glyphs are a neat idea. Except you take *quite a while* to get upgraded glyphs so your crap attack power can move forward, as well.
If you're emulating it with save\load states, fine. If you like to be annoyed, fine. I wouldn't honestly recommend this game to pretty much anyone however. While it's not bad, it's definitely malicious in some design elements.
Oh, did I mention some chests randomly appear each time you enter a location to explore it?
And that those chests at 10% can be rare chests?
Or that some ones are just *open palm gesturing* hidden and you need to wear a super weak hat or randomly slide where they are to find them?
