Quality game, but this time the boss fights can be too much.
Story takes place after classical Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which is to say sometime in the mid 19th century. Since the Belmont Clan has been vanished people have created other organizations to research countermeasures against Dracula. One of these is Order of Ecclesia, which has created a magical triad of glyphs based on dracula's power (called Dominus). Glyphs are stolen by Albus, a member of the Order, and after him goes the game's female protagonist Shanoa. Soon she arrives to a deserted Wygol Village and it's her job to rescue its inhabitants and in the process stop Albus from doing his evil deeds. There's a lot of text to be read, but still the story just passable.
Graphics are that same colorful, detailed and beautiful style and quality as always so once again Konami shows that it knows how to do deliver its vampire hunter franchise. Great touch is that most of the character models and animations are new instead of recycling those same ones that the series has done for years now and generic anime style has been changed to a more realistic approach. Sound design is again just as good as you've come to expect. Music is just brilliant to listen, but some of the sound effects can get repetitive. A new feature is that this time there's quite a lot of real voice acting involved. At times it can get a little cheesy, but still that's OK. All in all the audio visual presentation of Order of Ecclesia lives up to the series standards quite well.
Gameplay is very similar, if you've ever played a Castlevania game on DS. Upper screen shows the map and the lower screen shows the actual action. Touch screen features are not that common, but you don't really need them anyway. 2D sidescrolling is just as fun as ever, but this time you don't fight in just one castle. In the course of your adventure you get to see lots of different places and after that teleport freely between them. This takes away all that tedious backtracking you needed to do in older games of this franchise.
RPG elements are also familiar in that you gain levels by defeating enemies and collecting "glyphs", not weapons and spells, but the overall effect is the same. It works just fine, but this time upgrading them is a lot slower. As enemies drop glyphs you need to absorb a certain number of them in order to make them better and this can take a long time. A real downside is that for some reason the developers needed to give all the glyphs cool and mystical names. This means that when selecting them you need to browse through and specifically read the subtitle of that particular glyph, for example "an axe glyph". This takes way too much time than it should.
Difficulty level is surprisingly high: even if you consider yourself to be a Castlevania veteran this game still provides you all the challenge you can handle. Boss fights are big and many, but they are also the worst part of the package: they are just way too strong and take a lot of your health. Often you need to 1) grind your level up several steps, 2) collect enough gold to buy energy potions and 3) do multiple attempts before you learn all the patterns that the boss uses. This takes too much time, when you just want to progress the story. It takes around 12 hours to play through the game.
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is another quality game in Castlevania franchise, but unfortunately the boss fights can get a little too frustrating.