They shoulda used the romhack that removes the stupid touchscreen sigils in Soma’s game 
Can’t believe they’re also bundling an all new secret M2 Haunted Castle remake in this??? When did they make that?? Why did they make it??? Wish they included the Wiiware Castlevania Adventure ReBirth with this too then.
Wait, this is out NOW??? Oh shit
I guess I know what I game I’m downloading after work.
Apparently they changed the touch seals in DoS to be button press combos or something, so that’s alright I guess.
They did. I died to the first boss after trying to do the touch seal once. Two bosses in now using the button press combos - still a bit unclear how it works but the timing seems really lenient.
Just got the boss power to destroy ice blocks by touching the screen. Not sure how that works docked.
Snow falling off a mini-van roof when you jump on it is still sexy.
There are settings to adjust the display and ratio of the now 3 screens. One of the options is just DS style vertical orientation of 2 screens
I burnt out on these on the DS buying at release so can’t wait to do all 3 of them back to back on the Switch
Portrait Of Ruin 
Even in the original, the game was very generous with the amount of time it gave you to do the sigils. Didn’t help me for shit though because I’d always forget them and desperately try any combination, fail and then get booted back into the fight just to beat up the boss some more before getting the sigil prompt again. I guess it’d be easier now because I could just pause and look it up on my phone, but back then I was so annoyed at that mechanic.
I never played Portrait of Ruin back in the day because Dawn of Souls’ endgame burnt me out so much, plus the bad anime aesthetic bothered me so much. Guess it’s finally time to play through it and hear the Yuzo Koshiro tunes in it.
I like how they ordered the games by quality instead of release date (Ecclesia → Portrait → Dawn)
Playing both Haunted Castles back to back, the remaster is really good. Feels like a proper new Classicvania.
What made Haunted Castle unique among Castlevanias is gone though. The unfavorable hit boxes are gone. The weird little « I just saw a spider » jump Simon makes when hit is gone. Bombs as a subweapon seem to be gone. This could be blasphemy to someone (not me)
It makes me laugh that they used the fucking Gradius stage 1 volcano “midboss” as the volcano summon here (from the trailer):
What a deep cut, love it. (If it’s not actually the Gradius volcano, don’t tell me, I want to believe)
I played ecclesia for the first time only a few months ago, that’s a pretty great game. the bosses are mostly too spongey and I think it’s a bit uninspired visually sometimes, but it’s probably the only iga game that’s well tuned and it doesn’t sacrifice all the variety those games are known for to get there.
Maybbbbeeree this is an anti-piracy message but when I tried to play it as a lefty I failed the sigil stuff because there wasn’f enough time to take out the stylus set it to my left hand then figure out what to draw. I pretty quickly went and found a no-touch screen patch.
strongly agree, most of the GBA/DS ones always felt pretty slight and not very interesting to me but ecclesia is good on pretty much every level – the writing, the animation, the castlevania callbacks are pretty much all there
it was more or less the last castlevania game but they went out on a real high note, it’s probably the only post-sotn one that I would consider in the top 5
1CC’d the Haunted Castle Remaster on Normal, now playing on Hard. Hard adds more enemy varieties and numbers to stages and also introduces blood skeletons.
it’s cool! they got the feel of the games right, but a part of me does miss weird stuff like
the bomb and sword. what a nice surprise, though.
i woke up with this in my steam giftbox excited to see what they did to portrait of ruin
CHIBITECH DID THE MUSIC FOR HAUNTED CASTLE REMAKE!
Love how she just pops up in M2 stuff like the Dangun Feveron remixes.
Hell yeah let’s go chibi!!!
just from the screenshots on the Steam page, the original Haunted Castle graphics look more appealing than the remade ones; i guess i just love some glaring green and purple
the haunted castle remake sprites look great and it overall feels basically like a sequel to castlevania the adventure rebirth rather than haunted castle, but that’s fine. it’s just a nice feeling that a genuine, real castlevania game was released in 2024 and i hope we get m2 making castlevania legends remake or some other zany shit as a bonus when they port the ps2 vanias.
M2 being able to make Legacy of Darkness Gaiden that finally includes a proper story mode for the 4th player character is one thing I’d like to see before I die.
