Best portable Castlevania you can play.
Just like tradition, you assume a role of a vampire hunter apprentice who takes on Dracula and his legions of the undead with your trustworthy and trademark whip. The game play is basically a action RPG, in which you kill various monstrosities and earn experience points to level up. The higher the level you are, the higher the stats you have. Such as strength, defense, magic power recovery, and luck. Luck being the probability of an enemy dropping an item, which can consist of ammo for your secondary weapon, or accessories you can equip. This is a necessity, for having the right equipment or armor can determine the difficulty you'll experience throughout the 10 hours or more game play. Depending on what ever such items you run across, you can equip it to 3 specific parts of the body. Armor simply goes on the chest respectively, and rings, gauntlets, bands are adorned on either the left or right arm; This hardly makes a difference on which side, just mainly serves as 2 slots for more equipment. Respectively, every unique item has it's benefits and likewise faults. Some increase your magic and luck, however decrease strength and defense. Of course there are variety of ways in experimenting with customization, but one can just easily go with best "overall" items instead.
The most unique feature of this game that makes it stand out is the DDS. What it is abbreviated for, I have no clue - regardless - it's where you combine a pair of cards to make a desired magic attack; This is what you use your MP for. You obtain these rare cards from certain enemies and also depending on how much luck you may have. There are two types of cards, mythical gods, and mythical creatures. Creatures have attributes for elemental powers, such as fire, earth, wind, stone, etc. As god cards have attributes for various catalyst of these elements. For example, combining elemental fire of "Salamander" with the strength of "Apollo" will produce a fire whip. This, among with equipping mechanic, adds depth to an otherwise basic platformer...
Though it also is one of the games faults. It's kind of disappointing to realize that out of the 24 cards you can receive, only 1/4th of the possibilities actually produce a result. Not to say that the possible outcomes are more then enough to take on hard enemies or bosses, but it would of been better to see it fully used.
Another issues is the lighting, it's rather unfortunate for those who have a basic GBA and not even the GBA SP, because the visuals, though appropriately dreary in design, provide a obvious difficulty of seeing. It's hard to recommend this unless you have a SP, otherwise, you'll be killing yourself with out that back lighting.