Next Game Club meeting shall be Monday, Oct. 24, 6pm Central (4pm Pacific). I have to be at work at 8c, so hopefully this is a good time.

It’s been a week, so how’s everyone feeling?

I got an okay ending, after one hell of a boss battle. I understand that games these days are much easier than early games (because of such cheats as “controls that work” and “accurately detected collisions”), but that fight gave me the old-school run for the money that I’ve been missing.

But, the ending was not the best. Therefore, I have to play through again! The New Game+ is cool, but don’t expect to make it that much easier on you.

Onto the point though: I’ll always remember this Castevania. I can’t say that I remember a whole lot about Harmony or Circle, though Aria was top-notch. Dawn of Sorrow has reached up to the top spot, and is sitting up there with Symphony. I think Symphony feels like a bigger game because, for one, it’s on a big screen, and it had the whole inverted castle thing. Getting every single bit of map in that game was time-consuming. And, because it was first, it’ll always be more revolutionary. Dawn feels like an extension of that game, with better graphics (haha, DS > PS1), brilliant gameplay details, and a tight presentation. There were more than a few moments of Dawn that featured completely new gameplay elements. In this day, that’s a hard thing to come by. The slider puzzle that I spent far too long trying to put in order before I realized that it was futile, the unique souls that didn’t just mimic older abilities, but added totally new things, the myriad weapons that were all awesome. (I’ve gone from being a knife guy to an axe guy to a punch guy to a katana guy to a nunchuck guy) These things are distinctive. There’s probably a million other things too. And things I haven’t found out yet. The joy of discovery, that’s what I’m trying to get at. This may have been another iteration of an incresingly formulaic series, but it’s a really thoughtful one.

Some spoilers of extra gameplay follow, and nothing more. If you don’t already know what the extras are for beating CVDS, and you wanna be surprised, don’t read on. It’s nothing that shocking though.
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