So... Portrait of Ruin. Gameplaywise, it's Castlevania. If you've played one in the last decade, you've got the main idea. Explore maps, kill things, level up, get new equipment. The major addition is that you have two main characters. In both the main mode and Richter mode, you have both a melee person (Jonathon/Richter) and a caster (Charlotte/Maria). In Normal mode, Charlotte's spells replace subweapons. They have a casting time, so after hitting the subweapon activation, a charge bar appears. You can charge up to spell going off or a stronger version going off and cancel out of at any time.
You can swap between both characters, summon one to just attack, or have both out so the AI controls one. This almost gives you two very different ways to play. ... Almost.
The game seems designed for you to play as Jonathon. And, stupidly, actively penalizes you for not. See, any enemy that you hurt with a subweapon gives points to the subweapon that level it up. This means that Charlotte tends to be forced into the spot of being secondary character, which is a pity, as she was much more fun to play through the game as. (I ended up grinding up a few of the better subweapons near the end of the game, after buying 2 rings that double the rate you get skill points, via a glitch. A very acceptable use of a glitch, in this case, methinks).
So, the game is incredibly short. I beat the game, my first time through, in roughly 6 hours. I then beat the optional portrait (read: area) and got 1000% map completion and did all the quests (There's a person that gives you quests. You achieve some goal (Usually grinding to kill enemies for their drops) and you get a reward) in another 4 hours. This ... is pretty bad.
The shortness is due to the weirdness of design of the castle, that I didn't particularly like. You explore the castle to find Portraits, which you have to go in to and defeat a boss. You find 4 of these as you explore the castle... Then all of the sudden, you end up having access to 4. The castle is very small and lacking in variety. The portraits aren't bad, though. I'd prefer a single larger castle, methinks. There are an amusingly high number of shortcuts you can unlock, though, that you will never use. There are teleporters in the castle everywhere and you never revisit half the places you go to (... yeah, which kinda sucks), so I wonder why they're there.
However, the game does have a saving grace: A multitude of hard modes and optional modes!
The Hard modes come in 3 major varieties: Max level of 50, 25, and 1. Yes. You can choose to put the game on Hard mode (Where you deal less damage and ... enemeis deal weird damage. I want to say the damage that enemies do is something like just add 100 to it, as beginning of the game enemies did about 100-110 damage and end game enemies did like 140-150, with the same equipment) and not be able to level up. Of course, you do NG+ in Hard Mode, so you start with the best equipment in the game, and, inportantly, all the HP Max Up and MP Max Up items you find. Doing these modes gets you a stat boost that applies to any NG+ you do from that game on. The bonuses are Luck, Int, and Str, respectively. Hard Max Level 1 is ... hard, but doable. With heavy abuse of glitches and armor only useful in that mode(Every hit deals 10% max HP), at any rate. So, the big glitch of the game is that you can get quest rewards infinitely. This includes Max HP/MP Up (Limited to 32 of them, total) and things you can sell for money. There's a ring you get that boosts your attack by 1 per 100,000 gold you have. It's 20 minutes of boredom to get 900k gold to get +90 attack power. For reference, the best sword in the game gives you about +40 attack power and being level 50 gives you about 80 attack power. The game is pretty glitchy, but in this case, it takes away the fact that Metroidvanias have the shittiest money situation ever. So, awesome!
Richter Mode, you play as Richter and Maria. They can sequence break galore, but the mode seems a bit ... odd. See, you don't have equipment or items (Hell, you can't even go to the menu screen. Which is utterly stupid, as there are things like maps of all areas, the bestiary, the button config, in the menu.), which means you scale entirely on level and HP/MP Ups and you cannot heal. That I went through the normal game at what seemed to be way under level did not bode well for this mode. I beat Normal mode at 38. I got to Drac in Richter mode at 32. My horribly underleveled ass got schooled by Dracula repeatedly. I tried to the optional area, got about halfway through, got to level 36. Still can barely touch Drac. Geh. GFAQs, by the by, seems to recommend 45-50 for Drac. ... Whaaaa? So, I never beat Richter mode, as even learning Drac's patterns only goes so far. I'm not ninja enough to avoid every one of the attacks.
Still my second and third run through of the game did give me another good 10-15 hours out of the game, putting us at about 20-25 hours, which is much more respectable. It also does an amusing shift on the difficulty focus. Both Hard Mode and Richter mode tend to be a fight from save point to save point, hoping you don't die to the random enemies, but the bosses (Which are the much harder part in Normal) are a breeze, as you tend to have something in your repertoire that can easily defeat them.
Heh... I've entirely talked about gameplay. What of story, what of graphics, what of sound? THIS IS A CASTLEVANIA, FOLKS. Which means the story is throwaway (Drac is reviving! Wait, twist! Bad ending unless you do something specific! Wait, another twist! Kill Dracula! End.), the graphics are spritebased 2D (And, hey, pretty good), and the music was good (Which is a bad outing for the series).
Overall, a decent outing for the series. Not the best Metroidvania. I don't think I can call it the worst, though.
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