Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

I'm not sure how much I can say about this game. It was generally pretty fun. Which, actually, surprised me. 3D Castlevania? After how horrible I had heard the ones on N64 were and given my tendency to liking 2D games better (Even in this day and age), I didn't hold out too much hope. However, like my discovery that 3D Zelda and 3D Mario weren't horrible (and were even pretty good), I find that Castlevania is capable of good 3D games as well.
Let's do a rundown.

Plot: ... It's Castlevania. Set out to fight Dracula, encounter a few twists, probably work right into someone's plan, kill Dracula. ... yknow. I said this exact same thing in the last Castlevania review I did. Ha. Though, one of the characters, Saint Germaine, is pretty cool.

Music: Done by Michiru Yamane. Not *quite* as good as the SotN soundtrack, but a decent soundtrack. There were a few times when I noticed the music in a good way.

Graphics: Not great but not horrible. The people (of which there aren't really that many) have a bit of an odd look about them, but that's more of an art direction thing than a graphics thing, really. The monsters tend to look nice, though. The style is very Castlevaniaish. The areas tend toward dark and gothic, but don't fall into the only 3 Black, Grey, and Brown that some games do.

Gameplay: Ah, and the reason Castlevania has survived >20 years. As you don't play a Belmont in this game, your weapon repetoire is more than just a whip, and the game does multiple weapons really well. Like in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (and, as a more played example, Dynasty Warriors), you have a normal attack and a Strong attack. The Strong attack in this game tends to be combo finishing moves, but not always. This is one of the few games I've played where the weapons all feel really different and seem like they all have their own unique niche to fill in. There are: Swords, Huge Swords, Fencing Swords, Axes, Huge Axes, Spears, Knuckles, and Special. Special is weird and tends toward useless for 95% of the game. Now, the rest: Axes and Swords are pretty similar. Fastish, decent crowd control, decent against one thing. Huge Axes and Huge Swords are slow (Against fast enemies, you feel slugish as they dance around you - It's neat), deal a huge amount of damage, and can clear the area around you out with certain combos. Huge Swords also have a combo that works decent at single enemy focus. Fencing Swords are damned fast and are good at both single and crowd control, but they're weak. Knuckles are the fastest, weakest, and are bad at crowd control. But, oh, against a single enemy, you can stunlock the bastard until it dies. Spears are easily the best crowd control weapon, and, in that aspect, they're a bit slow - They have large sweeping attacks that put you a bit overextended. However, certain combos speed it up and can focus on single enemy attacks. They're pretty dynamic, it's cool. Now, each of those 8 categories has its own set of combos. Combos work like this: The normal attack button combos a set length combo. Hit the strong attack/final attack button at any point and you'll do a finishing move that changes depending on where in the normal attack combo you activate it. Each weapon has a wide range of different moves. They all feel unique and useful - Which is something that most games with a wide range of weapons really sort of fail at doing.
Other game aspects include: Being a Blacksmith. You make all the weapons and armor that you use in the game. You get material for this via enemy drops, chests, and stealing from enemies. The careful explorer and dedicated thief will be rewarded with high quality items. Though you can get by without just on enemy drops. I feel somewhere in between. I rarely stole, but did occasionally when it was easy. I managed to get a pretty good set of equipment throughout the game.
Being a Pokemon trainer. Er... You get familiars as you advance through the game. There are multiple types that cover healing, support, and combat roles. While I really disliked this idea at first, as it didn't seem necessary early game, the battles got tougher and the familiars got cooler and I accepted it. Turns out, I enjoyed the mechanic by end game. You evolve them by getting a drop depending on what weapon you use (Which actually isn't a pain in this game!) and they learn skills based on what evolution path they have. Some evolution paths give you abilities needed to get to secretish rooms/areas. I'd sorta recommend looking up evolution paths and such to make sure you get useful evolutions. Some of them are sort of bad - No skills to get to different areas *or* useful skills for combat. You can likely get by without on sheer luck, though. I managed it.

The difficulty, too, was pretty much just about right. There were a few hard bosses (and one that annoyed me, as you only have to do about 1/8th of his lifebar to end the fight), but none that were absurd. The monsters that filled the games environs, as well, were varied and fun to smash the crap out of.


Also, oh hay, look at that. I've beaten 200 games, according to my Backloggery.