Castlevania: Curse of Darkness
As good as 3D Castlevania games get, but that’s not saying much.
Published: November 17, 2005
Your weapon determines, again, how your Innocent Devil progresses (though conversely, you have no real idea what they’re turning into), but it also changes your combo strings, attack speed and so on. As you plow through the game, you’ll find certain weapons work better on certain enemies or bosses, so there’s a lot of switching up, which is quick and easy. This applies to the IDs as well, since some are better at offense, some help keep you healed and some are good for comboing the holy living hell out of some enemies.
For all this expandability and variety in what you can make and develop, though, the game itself is awfully repetitive, filled with endless look-alike corridors with progressively updated skins on them; castle, mountains, forests, villages, more castles. The storyline is enough to keep you plowing through if you’re a bit of an RPG nut and like seeing your character progress, but it becomes a source of tedium after a while.
It doesn’t help that this is a rather ugly game. The pre-rendered cutscenes are nice enough, and they definitely help charge the game with a little more potency, but the actual in-game visuals are painfully bland, with low-res textures stretched across the floors and walls, and overabundance of the same breakable objects like torches, and the occasional clipping issue. The framerate is pretty solid throughout, but with a game this simplistic, it should be.
Ditto for the audio. The voice acting is necessarily over-the-top, but this is the series that spawned “What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!” It’s supposed to be over the top, so it’s really a non-issue if you’re used to the style of dialogue of past games. The weapons effects and enemy grunts are pretty bland overall, though, and it’s really only in the pre-rendered cutscenes that the effects work pops.
The soundtrack is perhaps the most obvious sign that this is still a fanservice effort. Michiru Yamane’s work here is delightfully retro and subdued. There’s ton of borrowed bits and pieces from previous games’ music, which helps weave what’s here into something both instantly familiar (and with all the new stuff, it’s wonderful to still hear something that ties Curse to its roots) and yet still new enough that you geek out on it. I’m probably alone in thinking this, but a lot of the tracks – not the score as a whole – sound as good as the stuff in SotN. It’s very, very good.
If we could ignore the repetition and monotony and just gush over the music, that’d be one thing, but to get anywhere you have to, y’know play the game, and while the item creation and character building aspects are certainly welcome (hell, they’re needed in a game like this), they’re also a little foreign. If the only way we’re going to get something that feels like a 2D Castlevania in 3D is to move away from all the stuff that makes it a Castlevania game in the first place, I’d rather not get these updates. The game is certainly decent, but “decent” isn’t a word I like using to describe a series so dear to so many.
