Thursday, October 31, 2024

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, 2nd Half

 

Our Halloween festivities conclude with Soma playing a giant piano. Wasn't able to find a secret to this: It's just a giant piano, and it's there, so you can randomly play it before continuing on your way. These games are so stylish.

Side Note: So it seems that the 1999 battle between Julius and Dracula was actually the final resurrection of Dracula and he's defeated for the rest of time. Julius' 1999 battles being essentially the final battle of the Castlevania timeline (not counting Soma's future antics) makes it even weirder that we never got a game based around it.


The map is mostly filled-in at this point. I like that the Sorrow duo keep it to one main castle. Harmony of Dissonance having two virtually-identical castles was more confusing than interesting.

Next boss is this beast. This fight throws you a curveball when...

...the floor collapses and it turns into a fight where you're plummeting down a vertical corridor. Metroid Prime 3 did this with Omega Ridley.

Genya shows up with his best "let's fighting love" face.

Julius: "Let's fighting loooove!"

Clock Tower is the next section, and the gears are the shiniest they've ever been in this entire series. Makes sense since this is supposed to be a brand-new castle.

Next boss is this clawed bastard. This is where the game starts to get difficult if you haven't been synthesizing weapons. I expected to find upgrades naturally through exploration, and...nope, not in this game, it's all about synthesis. I'd figure it out soon enough.

The magic seals get particularly obnoxious at this late stage, turning into 11-button combinations.

Right here is possibly the best farming spot in the game. There's a relatively early room where you can fight a Golem to farm souls/exp. Golem souls give you a passive increase to your damage output that never really gets replaced by anything better. You can farm up to 9 Golem souls for maximum damage increase (about +15% at max endgame power / about +50% at this point). Only problem is that the souls drop so rarely that it becomes not worth the time if RNG isn't in your favor. I tapped out after getting Golem to 3/9, which was still a decent damage increase (and took a little over an hour of farming this room).

What makes it the best spot in the game is that one room above is a Manticore, which also has a super-valuable soul that's useful for the entire run. This gives you a lashing scorpion tail that strikes when you do, giving you essentially a double-attack. It's very OP at this point but less so as the game goes on. Can get up to level 9 on this as well, and it's way more common than Golem soul so I got it to 9/9 before moving on.

Isn't not being able to use magic seals actually a buff? I wish I couldn't use magic seals!

Julius deals with the magic seal problem by just obliterating bosses before they can regenerate. Works for me. Can I play that version of the game instead? (Editor's Note: Yes)

Next boss is a bat swarm that has difficult to avoid attacks (something bosses in this game do a lot of, as a sort of level/HP check).

Winning gets me Bat Form, which is awesome as usual. Now almost the entire castle can be explored.

Bat form also allows you to soar through the air and avoid foes. This lets me conclude my ascent to the top level of the castle.

Final Guard is the biggest, baddest regular foe in the game, and takes 1 damage from pretty much everything. His sole weakness? He can't turn around (and can be flown over in bat form). He's also got a crucial soul for weapon-synthesis.

A herd of Yokos attack! They're all shape-shifting succubi who want to suck Soma's blood.

We reach a lame impasse, as the next section requires you to have 3 specific souls to continue. Given how rare soul drops are, chances are high that most players will be missing at least one of them. The souls in question are Axe Knight (which everybody should have), Killer Clown, and...those little flying imp guys that leave flames hovering in the air. I had Axe Knight (of course) but not the others, so this totally interrupted the flow of the game and forced me to backtrack a lot.

First I murder Art the Clown about 50x to get...

...his soul. Then I gotta go find the fire-throwing imps. Good thing the internet exists because this is a HUGE CASTLE to have to find these random foes a second time.

This gets me to the ultra-creepy Paranoia boss, who jumps in and out of mirrors. Defeating him gets Soma the same ability (though it's only useful in a couple of rooms). More importantly, this ability lets you get to the true ending of the game (there's a dud early ending, like all of 'em since Symphony).

Next is the ascent to the pinnacle of the castle, where Dracula would normally reside. Since I AM Dracula, instead we find...

...Dario the X-Hunter. This is actually the final battle of the game if you haven't met all the criteria to move on to the real finale / best ending, like defeating Paranoia beforehand.

This is actually a worthy final boss, and resembles Flamelurker from Demon Souls.

The Manticore Tail totally shreds him. Have to go through the mirror in the background to finish the fight correctly and move on.

I do what I usually do in these Vanias and spend all my money on heal potions in the lategame. Don't usually need them any earlier than the fourth quarter and by then I've got some savings built up.

With Violen/Dario out of the way, Serges/Celia is the next X-Hunter to show up. She has Soma's friend Mina crucified in the background just to make him angry and cause him to Become Dark Lord. So she's given up on the other guys becoming Dark Lord and just wants Soma to turn evil so she can control him? Makes sense considering the other guys both failed to stop Soma.

Oh, damn, for a second I thought the game was doing something edgy. Nope, it's just an illusion, Mina's fine. "I can see her parachute! She's okay!" says Yamcha when reached for comment.

If you don't equip Mina's Talisman (the accessory Soma starts with, that does nothing until now), Soma actually Becomes Dark Lord and kills Celia here, ending the game as the new evil power. Equip the talisman and Soma maintains control, forcing Celia to retreat and leading to the next phase of the game. Yeah, this game has a bunch of potential endings and you have to do everything JUST right to get to the real ending.

Our heroes go back to the mystery portal in the east area. Wait, Julius could have opened this portal all along and just didn't feel like it? Well, he intelligently realizes that beyond the portal could be an even bigger threat that they might not want to face. And he's right.

DEATH is the toughest boss in the game, bar none. This guy is in absolute beastmode in this one. Makes sense considering this is pretty much bonus game / postgame at this point. The game could have ended with the Dario fight, or the Celia situation.

Death takes me a bunch of tries (that were all crushing losses), and has two forms as usual. At this point I realized I desperately needed to synthesize new weapons. The game let me get away with low-level weapons for a while, but in the endgame it's pulling zero punches.

Turns out I ignored weapon synthesis at my peril, and could have gotten some decent-sized upgrades a while ago. Axe is the main weapon I have the souls to level up, so I switch over to that. The pokey Estoc I've been using hits much faster, but it's very low-damage in comparison.

For 80% of the game I expected to find weapon upgrades like in Aria and it turns out I was going about it the wrong way. So I accidentally played Dawn on hardmode, lol.

Another axe upgrade puts it into some seriously-damaging territory now. I'm going for maxed-out, level 8 axe though.

Great Axe Armor here is a soul that's important for a number of weapon types to level up, and I totally ignored this enemy for the most part. Turns out you want to farm the hell out of it if you're maxing out weapons.

The 2nd-to-last tier is from the Final Guard soul, which is the biggest PITA in the game to farm due to how strong those guys are. Took a while and started to feel not worth it, but I saw things through and got it.

After going back and defeating Death with 3x the attack power as before, I use Death's soul to craft the final axe, Death Scythe.

This puts me at no less than FOUR times the power of the weapon I was using before I got back into weapon synthesis. However, if I expected the game to suddenly get easy now, I was in for a surprise: The endgame is pretty much based around having weapons in this tier already, so everything from here on out has Death-like HP.

The final area is The Abyss, which is basically a small amount of Hell.

In this very cool field, I battle the penultimate boss. Not sure what this thing is supposed to be, but it's just as nasty as Death if not moreso. Gotta have heal potions well-stocked.

Later, The Abyss (which resembles a Star of David) gives way to...outer space? We have officially lost cabin pressure.

This is how we want my potion collection to look going into the final battle.

Dmitri/Agile is the last of the bad guys to take down, as it turns out he survived our first fight by copying some other foe. Surprised there wasn't a fight with Celia, almost feels like cut content.

Speaking of Celia, he's got her crucified in the background, and she's already been sacrificed to make him the new Dark Lord. So Dmitrii is our final boss outta nowhere after all that buildup for Celia, interesting.

Moments after this picture was taken, Toad burst out of Dmitri's chest like a xenomorph.

Dmitrii then turns into a fusion of all the souls he's collected (as he copied Soma's ability to collect souls).

This gives us a big, gross, final battle. Run around on the floor of naked souls and dodge Dmitrii-Thing's poison-vomit while slashing at his skin-less head.

I mean, this basically is The Thing. His second form has him standing upright to become a multi-screen foe with several weak points that all have to be destroyed.

Manticore tail strike does a ton of damage here, so it's highly-useful while I'm also hacking away with Death's Scythe.

Defeating Dmitrii causes Soma to have a Quickening as he absorbs all the Dark Lord power that's floating around.

I mean it's legitimately The Quickening in every regard. Is this a sign that I need to do more Highlander?

That's the (real) ending, and we get a quick missive about how as long as light exists, so too must also darkness, and so forth.

Way-less-evil-looking Genya has faith that Soma is a good guy and will keep the power of Dracula forever sealed away within himself, making this chronologically the end of the entire Castlevania series. Cool.

That's it for this one. Great game, brought down a bit by the map issues and the post-boss Waggle Motion / code issues. I prefer Aria, though this one certainly looks nicer. It's good to have a one-two punch in the Metroidvanias where one of the games is a direct follow-up to another.

Beating the game unlocks a Boss Rush Time Trial, which is pretty easy to clear with endgame weapons/stats (and doesn't have all the bosses, think it ended with Death).

Beating this mode gets you Nunchakus, a weak weapon that strikes insanely fast, so you can actually pile on the damage with this thing Crissaegrim-style. Bringing this back into the main game for New Game Plus is probably an interesting thing to do.

The other unlocked mode is Julius Mode, which lets you play through the whole game with the whip-wielding Belmont. He doesn't have to do any waggle-minigames after boss fights, and uses a whip for the duration. He can also level up by defeating enemies, which sets this apart from other "(Character) Mode"s in other games in the series.

Good game, and it's easy to say that this and Aria are a huge improvement over the first two Metroidvanias on the GBA. There are a couple more on the DS after this, and while I think this one is a bit ahead of them overall, at least they fix the map issue. They're on the list.

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