Dawn of Sorrow is truly the best Castlevania game yet, and it should go down as an instant classic.
The story of Dawn of Sorrow takes place 1 year after the events of the Gameboy Advance’s Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Again, Soma Cruz is the main character, and an evil priestess named Celia Fortner, wants to make a new lord of darkness by killing Soma Cruz, and spreading Soma’s essence of evil, to someone else. So Soma must enter a castle and look for Celia, and get rid of her, before she gets rid of you. The story is well written, and works out in the end, and there are numerous endings to keep the game going and going for time to come. I really liked the story, but in many instances I got confused, and I didn’t know what was happening, but I got through it, and understood later. That sometimes was frustrating, but after I got over it, I was fine.
The sound is used quite well on the DS. Every new area you enter has a new, and quite excellent, background music to it. The sound effects work great, and sound awesome. Every slash of an enemy, to an explosion, it all sounds real, and works out great of the DS. Boss music sounds great too as every boss has different and outstanding melody. No voice overs doesn’t hurt at all, it might actually be best if there weren’t any. The stereo system of the DS works well too, when a sound goes from one side of the screen to the other, the sound goes from one speaker to the next, works awesome.
Beautiful, Dawn of Sorrow, even in 2D, is one of the best looking DS games to date. The smooth animations of the characters and enemies are excellent, and the design of the game is outstanding. The sprite work is well done, and deserves to be since this game is made on the DS, almost using the exact same sprites as the GBA Aria of Sorrow. The backgrounds in the game are sometimes in 3D which look awesome and make the game just that much better. The background should get a major applause because it look outstanding wherever you go, well done Konami. The bosses are extremely well-detailed and look almost real even though not in 3D which is really impressive.
This game, is basically a plat former game with more than just from getting from start to finish. There’s barely any instances where you can fall off of the stage like in Mario, which is awesome, so wherever you are, you have no fear of falling off somewhere to death. I extremely happy with the way the game plays, instead of getting from start to finish, you go around the huge map looking for different spells and defeating bosses. Sometimes when you defeat an enemy, you get it’s soul, and you can use it either by press R, Up + Y, or just by doing a special action. Some of the weapons you get in the game that you equip can be a quick slice, or a huge swipe, and some can do powerful damage to an enemy. You also have a magic meter below your health, and it lowers when you use a soul to attack. When it runs out, it might not seem like a huge deal, but during the game, you use the magic quite a lot, and you should always use it. There’s also a lot of jumping around and getting from one area to another, but during the jumping, you usually have to kill enemies on the way.
There’s tons of thing to do after you beat the game. You can do an alternate story with the all of the main characters besides Soma. This mode is quite fun, but it seems weird when you can go to some of the ending areas when you haven’t been to many of the starting areas yet. The boss rush mode is extremely fun, but can get frustrating when you half way through the game, and don’t have enough attack power to defeat a certain boss. There’s also Wireless multiplayer mode, which is also very fun.
This game is one of the best DS games to hit the market. The story is intriguing, the gameplay is fantastic and I keep coming back to this even after I defeated it tons of times. It doesn’t get old, and it should go down as an instant classic in anyone’s books.