That rules. Maybe I need to get the rights to make a live action MD Geist with cardboard box mechs and lots of kero syrup. The time is right to bring back all the Blockbuster Youth Restricted Viewing anime.
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I think Dark Souls kicked off a decade-long fascination with āJapanese take on western fantasyā and Lodoss is the grandfather of that aesthetic, inevitable someone would mine it in this environment
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fan-made mega drive port of x68000 castlevania, with link to a demo rom in the youtube description
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Iāve been meaning to do a write up of Aria of Sorrow like my other two GBA CV writeups but Iām afraid I donāt have much to say about it. Itās the closest antecedent to Bloodstained IMO, in that it kinda misses the magic of SotN but is really comfy and pleasing and vaguely maximalist on its own. In other words,
I want to live there, which is I suppose appropriate for the plot, but I took hardly any screenshots. It doesnāt sing but it does hum along. Itās fine.
Booting up SotN immediately after made me realize that what Aria of Sorrow is missing is Early CD-ROM energy. Just loads of sound effects and artwork and videos just because. Itās a little too purposeful and clean to have that chaotic āwhat the hell do we do with all this spaceā feeling that SotN (and Myst??) has.
Anyway thatās all.
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fronted by a goodlooking teenager who is actually the reincarnation of dracula with a unique power no other hero in the series has, the sorrow games are castlevaniaās attempt to court a chuunibyou audience.
they even have the whole āhidden society alongside the mainstreamā thing, with all the loiterers and hangers-on who wait around the entrance to the castle for various reasons.
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Yeah SotN really goes ham with the power of the PS1. Even though itās not usually considered a 2.5D game, thereās bombastic 3D in the savepoints, all over spell effects and certain enemy types, and I think also the trail Alucard makes as he walks. Unlike its Neogeo contemporaries itās not satisfied with just having more detailed pixel art than ever
I suspect Iga wouldāve wanted to continue to do the same thing but had to work within the limitations of GBA & DS
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technically, the ancestor of the aesthetic is Guin Saga but no one will ever do anything with that
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i still think its strongest attribute is not the 3D effects per se (though the ability to integrate them may have been part of the inspiration) but the consistently well executed trompe lāoeil in the pixel art making many of the backgrounds these rich dioramas you can relax your eyes and stare into. rare feeling to get in a 2D game
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favourite part of AoS is probably the underground reservoirs. their calm muted palette seems like the most uniquely Aria thing
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With regard to aesthetics I think SoTN deserves all the praise heaped upon it, but I played it for the first time a few years ago and rather than being impressed I was mostly just bored. I think Aria, which I played long before SoTN but have returned to now and again, is a much more exciting game to play. I know a lot of the impact of SoTN was lost on me because the novelty had been ruined by its many clones, but SoTN has a lot of flaws that rarely seem to bother people.
I found traversing the castle pretty boring overall, especially the inverted castle, and rushed through the game. But still, I beat the final boss mostly by standing in one place and whipping and healing. The game is packed with secrets but theyāre mostly meaningless because you donāt really need any of them. And the hidden stuff you can find isnāt nearly as fun to play around with as the stuff you get in Aria. Iām playing Circle of the Moon now, and at least the castle there is somewhat challenging to navigate.
I rarely say this, but I donāt think SotN needs to be revisited. It was so influential that all its good ideas were copied, but so flawed as a game that it isnāt really worth experiencing. I think thereās more to be gained by exploring proto-metroidvanias like Faxanadu or Legacy of the Wizard that werenāt cloned so precisely than there is from SotN.
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agreed, I would compare it to Chrono Cross ā an outsized example of all the things about PS1 games that are audiovisually appealing, but an exception to the rule in that itās actually aged very poorly despite being well regarded in the first place
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This is something I love about this series! Between the RPG style growth and the item system (not so much you Circle of the Moon), the difficulty of these games is self imposed in a way thatās very friendly to people who arenāt as skilled but also fun for folks looking for something more traditionally action focused. And something simple like not healing for bosses feels totally normal and even natural (thanks to healing being relegated two menus deep and not a controller button) and not like some weird Dark Souls no leveling run or whatever.
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I get what youāre saying and I do appreciate that SoTN can be approached from multiple angles. Iām not sure there is a good skill-based way to fight most of the bosses though. Iām by no means an expert at the game but i didnāt feel like they were designed with exploitable patterns. It seemed to me like my options were either to grind for levels and gear or to just spam healing items. I could totally be missing strategies but the majority of bosses felt like battles of attrition that my probably under-leveled character could finish with relative ease. I admit that there probably is gear out there that trivializes many of them, and finding that exploit is probably a fun little meta game, assuming Iām right about that.
Iām not discounting that it could be a good thing that the bosses are easy though! If players find the battles fun and/or interesting, that is all that matters. I remember having a lot more fun with Ariaās boss battles though. I think it is just better all around I guess!
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SotN is definitely playable from a pure action / pattern recognition perspective which is obvious if you play in the bonus mode with Trevor, but admittedly he has a different moveset from Alucard that makes that much more feasible.
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Yeah Richter mode is a full expression of that concept. I think some of the latter games did nail the traditional actions learn-the-boss-patterns model a bit better though. Portraitās really stand out, but also I havenāt played a lot of them since release and thatās pretty new.
How shitty is that one that ties in with the newer 3D games?
Richter. Trevor. Fuckin whatever. The boys.
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pretty sure thatās ralph belmont
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yeah this is maybe the most obvious thing about aria, especially right after HoD. The castle tends towards blues and whites, reflecting Soma in a nice way, and itās generally a much more restrained and cool palette. CotM is brown and earthy, HoD is bright red and sticky, and AoS is blue and damp.
Funnily enough my first time playing through it i was knocked on the floor with how much I loved it despite having played all the GBA games + DoS, but I also did not like the inverted castle very much at all. Itās such a mixed bag, but at least I feel like the individual rooms in the castle have a lot more personality than some of the GBA stuff.
I also donāt like old castlevania at all though so iām not really looking for anything resembling that.
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Iāve recently played Bloodstained with the randomizer mode set to everything on and I had such a great time. It helped that my seed gave me some ridiculously OP stuff at the very beginning though.
Itās left me wanting to try playing Aria of Sorrow with randomizers too. Does anyone have experience with that? How was it?
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