Castlevania + Anime + Bad story = Dawn of Sorrow
Visually, this game has the best of both worlds. Bright and colorful, and yet still atmospheric. Well drawn sprites, excellent animation and cool looking weapons and attacks, this game is a dream to look at, from the DS' standard. At the same time, it suffers greatly from reused sprites, the overall anime art style, reused backgrounds, and this strangely unshakable kiddy feel that lurks through the whole game.
All of those are highly detrimental to the otherwise nearly flawless gameplay. There are only two really noticeable flaws other than the above listed, which can be summed up in two words: SotN syndrome. This game, in terms of gameplay mechanics, is SotN with new weapons, areas and people. The gameplay is literally identical to SotN, down to the "Muscle mass is Inversely proportionate to strength" thing that was going on. Dishing out hundreds of points in damage from a scrawny, pale teen is not right at all.
What this game does almost perfectly, however, is repairing the somewhat broken soul system in its prequel, Aria of Sorrow. In AoS, collecting certain souls means that other souls become completely useless (ex: Collecting a soul that gives +16 to your attack means that your souls of +2, 4, 6 and 8 are now all useless), whereas here, each and every soul has a completely different effect, and collecting multiples of each soul increase the strength seemingly every 3, 5 and 9 souls you collect. Not all of these are good, however, which is why the soul release feature is quite useful.
Another useful addition is Soul Fusion, where you can mix a weapon and a soul to make a new weapon, sans a soul. Therein lies the greatest flaw in gameplay: The souls are incredibly hard to get in this game. Most of the time you spend playing this game will be spent grinding for souls, which you will most likely spend on a weapon. All that would be needed would be to increase the drop rate, and this game would be SO much better. As it stands though, its bad enough for me to spend most of a paragraph ranting about it.
Moving on
The story is, frankly, pitiful. Allow me to summarize it in two paragraphs:
Soma is hitting on Mina, Celia (antagonist) attacks him, reawakens his power, soma wins by getting a pocket knife from Alu-Genya, who JUST SO HAPPENS to be in the area. Soma wanders off alone, is followed by Hammer, who he didn't notice during his entire trek through the mountains (which, mind you, he went without the aid of any sort of storage for, y'know, food, weapons, etc). Soma meets Yoko/Julius, Julius peaces, Soma beats major monster face, meets celia and two people who just so happened to have been born on the exact same day that Dracula dies. Soma later kills blonde guy, and beats up biker guy, celia saves biker guy.
Soma meets biker guy in Dracula's room, jumps through mirror, beats up biker guys power. Biker guy flees, celia mocks, later tricks soma by killing a doppleganger of Mina. Soma gets mad (SOMA SMASH), almost becomes dracster, saved (AGAIN) by Genya, who just happens to be in the area (AGAIN), blonde dude comes back, kills celia, dies, Soma beats up blonde dudes oversized spine monster. On the way, julius uses up his power, genya gets owned, hammer falls in love and yoko is annoying.
Sounds frighteningly like a Saturday morning anime to me. And I think I'm writing too much, so lets wrap this up.
The audio is decent, good quality, and unlike PoR, not all action. Far better than AoS, although still lacking something. Wins for having Into Dark Night, though. Voices are decent, although still Japanese, although the game is in europe.
So...
Graphics: 8/10, very strong, too repetitive
Gameplay: 7/10, well refined but nothing new, too much grinding
Story: 3/10, its doomed to be nothing more than a sidenote in the series
Sound: 8/10, decent variety, but lacks a certain spunk, a certain charm
Replay: 9/10, Julius mode is excellent, and wins for actually having a story
OVERALL: 7.5 (if you think its an average, your stupid)
A well done game, but its very obvious that it was taken out of the oven well before the timer went off. I'm still trying to figure out what it is I love about it, though. Maybe I just like hurting anime soma?