Castlevania Portrait of Ruin (DS)

I bought the European version of this despite already having the US version (even more evidence that I don't make good purchases) but I still went through the whole thing again. This time, I bothered to unlock the extra area by doing more of Eric's stupid quests, but this extra area is practically just a boss run, and most of the bosses have just been taken from the previous game with no new attacks or anything like that, so that was pretty disappointing.

Beating the game unlocks Richter mode, where you get to play as the guy from Chi no Rondo and Maria, a little girl who throws birds at enemies, and it does work. Neither of them can use stuff like potions so the game gets harder during some boss fights, but I still maanged to beat this mode in about 4 hours (and one hour was just spent levelling up in the extra arena). Also, there is a Sisters mode where you can play as Stella and Loretta, two evil girls who eventually become good, but this mode isn't much fun at all and I'm not going to bother with it yet. The pair float rather than walk and you have to touch the screen to make them attack -not ideal when trying to move and attack at the same time, as you can imagine.

I did enjoy this game but it has been really over-rated by most reviewers, and I think Konami needs to ditch the Metroid style system for the next game and possibly bring back the stage-based style of the older games.

Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow (DS)

And then we have the first DS Castlevania game, which I completed last month. Completing it for the first time unlocks Julius Belmont mode, which I started but didn't get very far into, but after seeing a video of there being a new final boss for Julius, I decided to give it another try and eventually completed it. Julius is always armed with the vampire killer whip, and there are another two characters that join you -Yoko and Alucard -and you can switch between them at any time. None of them can use items like potions either and the only way you can heal is by attacking enemies with Yoko, so it makes the game a lot harder in certain places.

The extra boss was O.K. (a Dracula possesed form of Soma, the main character in the game) and has two forms, a normal human and a huge demon beast, but it didn't take me that long to kill him and there was no proper ending so all that effort in completing it again wasn't really worthwhile. Now that I've done that I'm finished with this game and I'm in no rush to play through it again. Again, like with the above mentioned title, Dawn of Sorrow was enjoyable but not to the level everyone says that it is -out of the few Castlevania games I've completed, Circle of the Moon is still my favourite and some of the stuff in this one doesn't work that well at all -having to draw on magic seals after defeating a boss, for example, can get extremely irritating if you do it wrong as it means that you have to keep fighting the boss again. Between the two DS Castlevanias available so far, I liked Portrait of Ruin more.