Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia - Act III

 

Wrapping "Halloween" up with one last Castlevania post. I wouldn't mind wrapping Shanoa up. Specifically, in mummy wrap so she can be Shishio and I'll be Kenshin. We can go around asking random houses for candy while people tell us "please leave, it's November" and "oh my God, there's a man with a sword outside! Honey call the police!"

Previously on Order of Ecclesia: I fought Albus and got the bad ending. Now I fight Albus again with all villagers rescued, and we'll see what happens next.

A blood-tattered Albus tell Shanoa the truth: He meant well-a all along. It was Barlowe who wanted to use the power of Dominus for evil! He just interrupted it, and ran around all game acting like an asshole rather than explaining this sooner.

Back at the ranch (I think Albus is ded), Shanoa now refuses to do the ritual rather than sacrificing herself like she does in the bad ending.

Barlowe goes full mask-off real quick. The popped collars gave this guy away as evil long before this!

Barlowe attacks with MAGIC BALLS. This fight is surprisingly not-bad, much like Albus. That hour I spent grinding levels probably made the endgame a lot more doable, which is why I should have done it a lot earlier in the game (the minute Luminatio and the Skeleton Cave are both available).

So basically, everyone Shanoa was close to was lying to her for various reasons for this whole game? No wonder she can't feel anything.

With his dying breath, Barlowe croaks the TRUE purpose of The Order...

...wait what

So this order that was established during the Belmont-less void of the 1800s to fight Dracula if he re-emerged... were actually Vlad-ites all along? They correctly surmised that as long as they called themselves the "anti-Dracula squad" nobody would ask questions.

Dracula's Castle now reappears thanks to Barlowe's death. ...at least I think that's what's going on. In any case, he's back. It's another mid-century Dracula triggered-resurgence, because Lord knows they don't do end-of-century revival games with Belmonts anymore.

Dracula's Castle is the final area of the game, and while it's smaller than the castles in the rest of this series, it's much bigger than all of the smaller areas to this point. It's also more of a traditional explorable castle than all of the hallway-like areas before this. It accounts for roughly the last third of the gameplay, and probably the most interesting third.

Laura has been trying and trying!

"I'm mostly too distracted with work to enjoy anything" says Shanoa as an hour goes by and Laura tries and tries.

I finish as many of the town side-quests as I can before I head to the castle. Ideally, you get High Potions unlocked at the shop by doing the right quests for it. Unfortunately, I didn't. So much like what happened in Dragon Quest 1 HD endgame (coming up), I had to make do with a subpar heal for the endgame due to not being thorough enough.

HOWEVER. Food items in this game actually tend to have a better gold : HP ratio than potions. So I stocked up on the few food items available to buy and that got me through the endgame. Minestrone was particularly useful.

We get a gorgeous cutscene of Shanoa walking into the castle.

The game kinda feels like it's starting for real at this point, and it's definitely the most traditional phase of the game.

Far as Drac Castles go, this is a particularly non-complex and straightforward one. Even here the game is kind of linear and sectioned off into "stages" of sorts.

It also contains sexy statues.

First boss (of five) is this weirdo, the Wallman. He can't be damaged, and attacks with these bombs that are straight out of Bomberman:

Stand between the explosions and absorb the glyph the guy casts right before a bomb attack to one-shot the fight (it's the only way to win it anyway). The absorb usually gets interrupted unless it's timed perfectly, and I found that standing by the doorway was the best spot to actually get the absorb to succeed.

This is pretty much the weapon I used for most of the remainder of the game. Dual-wielding this and alternating stabs racks up damage extremely quickly.

Also got a third of a Cerberus head. The goal of the castle is to find all 3 of these to unlock the way to Dracula. All 3 are hidden behind bosses, of course.

This next section is really cool, and everything has a long shadow here.

Which brings us to the next boss, Blackmore. This dude is bad-ass, and his giant werewolf shadow is what you're actually fighting.

This was the hardest fight in the game for me and it wasn't even close. His attacks absolutely chunk your HP and are tough to avoid. Supposedly increasing your Dark resistance (via equipment and buffs) makes this fight easier, but I didn't have the right composition for that.

Rapidus Fio is the latest buff glyph, and give me a Speed Booster run that is always in effect as long as the buff is active. This makes Shanoa zip all over the place and damage foes by just running through them. It's awesome, but not easy to control, so I ended up getting very limited use out of it.

Here's the gateway to Dracula's lair. Still have two heads to go, but first...

Laura is TRYING AND TRYING and it just isn't doing it for Shanoa.

....indeed.

Despite giving Shanoa the absolute job of a lifetime, she still can't get so much as a smile out of the woman.

Shanoa apologizes, and it's back to the castle.

That concludes the innuendo-filled relationship between Shanoa and Laura. At least Laura realized some things, like how hot a back tattoo is.

The biggest threat in the castle are these damn robots that take 1 damage from everything physical, have to use magic.

Look at that map filling out as I run around. This zone makes all the other zones look like micro-levels.

Two bosses down, two to go before Drac.

Solid background art, as I arrive at the Clock Tower:

This place isn't the nightmare it usually is, and this has to be the most horizontal Clock Tower ever in the series.

Whoa, it's that giant whirling blade enemy that has shown up in every game since Symphony of the Night and always looks way more threatening than it is.

In the basement of the Clock Tower is Eligor, a giant robot-horse. This thing is really nasty, forcing me to use the shield glyph for the first time all game. The first one (Scutum) is an upward shield which is perfect for blocking the arrows the boss fires.

Once the kneecaps are taken out and the boss falls down, you have (what is probably) a limited time to wail on the eye in the back of the head. I unleash all the super-attacks I can muster and that's barely enough to get it done. Very tough fight here, probably a distant second behind Blackmore for this game.

That's the second Cerberus head, which means the third can only be in one place: The top of the Clock Tower.

This accessory is a substantial stat increase (and this isn't even the full effect, this is just how far it is over my current stat ring, the Chariot). In particular, it adds a huge amount of attack power. Unfortunately, the side effect is that you can only take one hit. This renders it pretty much unusable, though if you want to be rewind-happy in the Dominus Collection it's possible to mess around with it for a while.

Just in time for the next boss, Death, which is of course on the upper side of the Clock Tower. If Dracula is back, his hetero lifemate is never far away. This is the usual fierce fight you can expect from Death, but I found it a lot easier of a fight than Eligor or Blackmore. Both of those fights felt really overtuned.

The final Cerberus head! That means only Dracula remains. Check out the size of the castle map. It's pretty cool to finally have what feels like a real area in this game. Crazy that there are probably some players who never got to see any of this because their game ended with Albus and they stopped there.

Surprisingly, the Cerberus itself isn't a boss fight, just a statue. I was sure it would come to life once I brought the 3 heads here.

The last powerup of the game, and the biggest one. This is effectively the Space Jump and allows you to fully explore the entire game. There isn't much to find outside of Dracula's Castle, though. Most of the other zones got picked clean the first time through.

Still, this is awesome to play around with. It feels like this game is very top-heavy with the powerups and interesting elements, like everything particularly cool is bunched-up towards the end. If things like flight and the speed booster were acquired a bit earlier, along with the bosses and weapons/abilities in general being better spread-out, this game would probably be a lot more well-liked. As it is, it feels like they saved all the really good stuff for the last hour of a ten-hour game.

With the Cerberus heads placed and all four bosses down, the way to Dracula appears. He's pretty happy that for once they didn't send a DUDE to take him out. However, he's barking up the wrong tree if he thinks he can charm Shanoa.

One of the easiest Dracula fights in any Igavania follows (which is funny because the rest of this game isn't easy). It's a basic fight where his head is vulnerable and he launches fireballs between teleports.

He goes crazy with the fireballs in this one, but you can swat them out of the air.

One thing to watch out for is his Super Ball Punt, where he rears back and launches a full-on crescent kick right to his opponent's neussen. Despite not having a neussen, this does significant multi-hit damage to Shanoa and can straight-up end the fight.

However, when you stay out of that attack's range, the fight isn't bad. Switching to axes and absolutely blasting them by alternating the two attack buttons will light him up. I only had the mid-tier axe Vol, not the tier 3 axe (Melio) so this would have been significantly easier if I'd found that.

The union attack of Dominus (i.e. the thing Shanoa uses to sacrifice herself in the bad ending) finishes Dracula once he's weak enough, and that's it for him for another 50 years or so.

Albus' Ghost appears and asks Shanoa for one thing. CAN SHE DO IT?

Yes. By God! The most hyped-up smile in a game ever? Probably.

So that's it for the Order of Ecclesia (and this game, Order of Ecclesia). They were never heard from again. Whoever they were. All we see of the Order in this game are 3 people, Shanoa/Albus/Barlowe. Was this game filmed during COVID or something?

Alright, that's it for the 'Vania series. It's been a long journey. I ranked this in the Igavania Rankings and found it to be better than the mid entries but not as good as the great entries. It's in the middle and it's decent for what it is. However it lacks most of the punch that the last 3 or so games in the series had. Like I actually wanted to do everything in Aria of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin, but here I had no real desire to go back and revisit it after the credits rolled.

That said...there are a couple of bonuses:

Albus Mode, where you play the whole game as Albus. He's got a gun, so you can blast everything at range.

There are also two optional side-areas added to the main game. One is an obstacle course called the Training Hall, with no enemies but lots of traps. I neglected to get any shots of that place; it was over quick. The other is the weirdly-dull-named Large Cavern, which is a straightforward series of very difficult fights one after another, culminating with the closest thing the game has to a postgame uberboss.

The fights contain the game's strongest enemies, sometimes several to a room, and wear you down FAST even at level 44. However, there's a trick to this. Equip double Globus (which can be absorbed from an enemy a couple of rooms into this dungeon) and fire Barlowe's balls as fast as possible while flying in the air. Staying airborne will give you room on the enemies, and the Globus balls bounce off of the walls to the extent that they're pretty unavoidable for large enemies like this. Flying back and forth spamming Globus will get this whole dungeon cleared pretty quick.

Well, everything except the boss:

Jiang Shi is a super-strong floating zombie who I suspect is a reference to something. He's got more HP than Dracula and he's very challenging to put down. The main issue is these blue energy spheres he summons that slowly home in on you forever. After a while, they really start to collect and become a big mass of energy creeping around the room stalking you.

I managed to win this fight by using flight to zip around the energy spheres (lure them down a bit and then fly over) while firing back with Globus. However, after the fact I found out that there's a much easier way to do this: The shield glyph will block the energy spheres and make them poof with no damage to Shanoa, so you can easily clear them out by equipping that and jumping through them with it on.

I probably didn't make enough (read: much of any) use of the shield glyphs in this game. Turns out they're quite OP. That and doing the Skeleton Cave grind earlier are my two main takeaways for getting through this game with less trouble than I did. And maybe stacking some Dark resistance for Blackmore.

Welp, that's it for Shanoa and Ecclesia. Good game.

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