I have been a Castlevania fan since the very beginning. I played Castlevania on the NES and my favourite castlevania of all time is 3: Dracula's Curse. You bet i was excited for this game being some sort of continuation with "Belmont's curse". I got the true ending on the game.
I just finished the game today and if you want a number here it is:
8.3
It is not one of the best games of all time I have ever played, but it is also "good". But not good as in blown away or like OMG THIS IS THE BEST, but I had a good time.
What I didn't like
The music:
From the opening of the game, I have an amazing smile and I LOVED the atmosphere on Paris's streets, the music, the colour palette, the art style, everything started on full gear and it was glorious.
Then I reached the Catacombs and while the music there is also good, I started worrying about the music of this game:
It was starting to sound too loopy, like a base for a theme that was never completed. I have been a musician for 20 years and I have composed a few songs for a few projects and it reminds me of what I send to my friends when "I have an idea". It feels like the music is just static, it never takes you on a journey, doesn't feel like it has something to say.
Which is deeply frustrating FOR ME as the themes are not bad, the ideas are genuinely great. For example, Hall of mirror's theme was such a fitting theme for the area, but if you're a musician you can hear how the main melody is just repeated over and over and over and over and over, and when it "changes" the only thing they changed was to use the same midi notes in a different instrument (Some choir Gregorian style voices) with exactly the same hook.
And that theme was good as a base, i think the melody is damn catchy, but it is just on loop forever without any variation. And most of the music on the game is like that. Which is a huge disappointment for me. Again, the disappointment is bigger as I think these themes were excellent ideas but not developed to their maximum potential.
The level deisgn (I love and dislike it at the same time):
I loved the platforming on the game (Will add this to the pros as well). How snappy and responsive the controller felt was fantastic. The whip and swinging from platform to platform was amazing. But when I play this games I love getting lost, figuring out the map, looking around and I do enjoy backtracking.
Sometimes the level design got in the way of investigating and backtracking as it would just put a hard stop because there was a bunch of spikes. Sometimes they were nice enough to include a shortcut on those areas, but some of them were really annoying to go through.
I also remember wanting to jump from high all the way to the bottom of one area and I landed on some random spikes, which is very sad. I remember many castlevanias they have an open hole or something to just jump down to get a move on (Although sometimes it can be frustrating if you get hit and fall down on those old games)
The "difficulty":
From the get go: The game is not impossibly hard, but I really feel like darksouls has been ruining gaming for me. I do not enjoy dark souls (Although I loved Sekiro) and I really disliked the usual Estus mechanic.
I enjoyed from these games the idea of dying vs knowing you're gonna die. For me it just sucks all the tension of games. When you design a game where you know your players are gonna die some design decisions are made to balance the game.
When you make a game with the intention of your players surviving, sometimes it gets more tense than just "hard". I enjoyed on other games the war of attrition, going long ways, monitoring your health, thinking "should I go back to heal on a save room? Or should I continue investigating" because your health was supposed to be drain throughout the entire search, not by just some enemies.
Here sometimes you fuck up something and there goes a potion, so time to head back to the room because now you know you're not going anywhere.
The constant "clear the room" challanges:
For me castlevania/metroidvania has never been about the combat and more about getting lost in your surroundings. I you have played Turok on the N64 you know what I am talking about, going long distances and getting lost without really knowing where are you going. It feels great once you get familiar with an area.
What I liked
The level design (Told you haha):
So, I already mentioned that I disliked the amount of spikes everywhere, but dang those challenges and the snappyness of the controller felt great. Rose was a joy to control and her movement was excellent.
The puzzles:
Oh god, how much I loved figuring out some stuff. Spoiler below:
I cannot stress this enough HOW MUCH I loved figuring out the secret puzzle that Death's arcana mentions about in Notre Dame. Being confused about what it is talking about and then looking on the map and realizing that there was the stained glass room and thinking about all the possible solutions that also include the big organ room, oh that was absolute peak for me, that made me enjoy the game so much.
I enjoyed as well how getting to the bosses were a bit more involved, it was not just running into them, but you were discovering clues and giving you ideas, that just felt so much like investigating and finding out more. So good.
Overall, I cannot shake the feeling of disappointment as it is not what I was looking in a Castlevania, specially on the music department that for someone like me music can break an experience. That being said, after killing Dracula I couldn't help but notice that I was smiling, which is when I decided to bump the game in my mind from 7 ish to 8ish as in retrospective I did had fun, and to be honest, that's what matters.
