Castlevania Thread - Eclipse Edition

Soma is going to be born tomorrow. Have you replayed Aria/Dawn of Sorrow recently?

That's a pretty nice attention to detail

Actually, I started to replay it on Japanese just for this occasion and to practice Japanese. I understand like 30% of it, which is nice.

Why would I do that when SoTN is better in literally every single way?

Wrong

Sotn has better graphics and music, but Aos has better combat and levels rooms.

I've been playing Circle of the Moon again (actually was my first Castlevania, even though I grew up with a NES I never got in to it until GBA for some reason), fucking great game, almost done. I never played the sequels and I'm going to give them and the DS ones a go. What am I in for?

First you're in for really ugly in Harmony of Dissonance, the game after Circle of the Moon, then really pretty with Aria of Sorrow, the game after that.

So you only play one game, watch one movie, and listen to one album because why would you consume stuff that's worse than other stuff?

I suppose it's fitting in some way that tonight is a new moon.

inb4 classicfags derail the thread

Harmony is insultingly easy with shit music

Aria is great

Dawn is almost a perfect sequel if not for the gimmick pentagram drawing that are a pain in the ass to do in emulators

Portrait I've only played for a couple hours, the tag team with JONATHAN CHARLOTTE JONATHAN can throw you for a loop

Ecclesia I haven't played

Ecclesia is great, it feels like the old games for most of the storyline.

Visuals don't bother me much unless we're talking old Atari or modern "Indie Pixel Art" and whatever the fuck you call what they did to Final Fantasy VI on phone. Still I'll keep that in mind. I'm mostly curious about the gameplay I'm looking at down the road.

So Harmony not only looks bad it also sounds bad and is too easy? Shitty. I'll still play it for completions sake (and to see why it's so shit. I'm a programmer and it's not hard to imagine making one of these one day). Oh well, at least Aria and Dawn sound great.

My backlog's so dense I don't if I'll ever finish Portrait, but everything I hear about Ecclesia makes me want to play it.

Harmony is worth it for completion's sake, but yeah, it feels like a bad over correction to Circle of the Moon, with it's garish colors nd reduced to difficulty.

Play it nigga, it's the most linear of the Ds vanias, its art style is superb and music is great too

Harmony is not very good but you should play it anyway because you can 100% the thing in 3 or 4 hours on your first walkthrough

I thought about this for a while. You know those shitpost threads where people claim a square of an image and redraw it alone in mspaint then they assemble the result? Yeah, that.

Shame because I actually really love Circle of the Moon's challenge. Makes me feel like I'm really accomplishing something by beating it, and I really want to come back and try the other modes later.

Well at least it's quick.

That's accurate.

R U I N E D

Fuck you. Sure, is not as good as previous one because it's too chiptune, but it's still good for what it is. This one and chapel of dissonance are great.
Unnecessary sequel, though, but it did good.
I never got this, you're not required to change them every single time, so why people usually complain about this? This is something that only bother speedrunners.
PoR is honestly pretty damn good, even when it's the weakest of the 3 DS games, it's the one with more content. Only problem is the shitty art like Dawn.

The reason Harmony of Dissonance came bad is because it tried too hard to be SOTN

Their faces are slightly different, though.

Nope, too busy playing superior Classicvania.

Incorrect

Why would I play an inferior entry in a series when I could play a superior one? Do you have autism?

That's not a good thing when the gameplay is made for metroidvania style level design. It wasn't at all as tight as a proper linear action game would be, and when it finally opens up just before the end, it's really disappointing because the castle is terribly boring, you have almost all the upgrades already and there isn't enough variety. The other DS Vanias make much better use of that gameplay by sprinkling a whole bunch of opportunities to use your powers all over the place.

Maybe because it's an special ocassion, or because you have already played SotN or because Aria is actually better than SotN and you're full of shit.
Here's an example: my favorite Metroid is Super, that doesn't mean everytime I wanna play a metroid game I go and play that one, that would be stupid.

Do you?

No nigger, fuck you. The GBA has better sound fidelity than that. Iga was retarded and focused so much on the ugly colors and smooth animations that the music suffered for it. The compositions are fine, the sound quality is what blows.

Right on time.

It's really easy to get lost, though, specially because of how retarded the teleport room is.

The rest are different, not worse. In fact, SOTN is the less polished and it only had the excuse to run in something powerful as the PS1 in his time, and yet, it's missing a lot of things from the Saturn version.

As I said the music could be better, but it's still pretty damn good for a chiptune. So fuck you, specially since HoD is better than CotM anyway.
This reminds me that the best thing of Judgement is the music and the intro.

No it isn't you fucking nigger.

Fixed.

Well, fuck you and your shit taste then, faggot.

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I get the feeling that the issue with Harmony of Dissonance's color palette stemmed from Circle of The Moon being hard to see on an original GBA (which isn't as much of an issue these days with backlit screens to play with). Meanwhile, Aria likely had the benefit of being developed with the SP in mind, as those models came out a few months before the game was released, thus the game could have been made with a system that had it's own light source (be it backlit or just sidelit) in mind.

Ecclesia's an odd one, but a good one if you ask me, and handles as a mixture of stage-based locations for the first half/two-thirds, before moving to exploring Dracula's Castle in similar fashion to SotN/etc. With combat you need to take into account what an enemy's attributes are, as well as gauge attack patterns properly. The lighthouse crab is kind of an infamous roadblock for some, but I've also heard of some faggots that have given up on the giant skeleton in the prison.

Nice art style (especially after the generic anime shift for Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait) and the music's good too, though it's not like Castlevania isn't generally known for having good soundtracks.

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That's exactly why. Juste having that blue aura was meant to make him noticeable on the original screen.

What's the best Castlevania to play for someone that's never played anything in the series before?Don't you dare give me a meme answer like the N64 games, Judgement, or Lords of Shadow.

The only reason CotM is "hard" is because of shit controls. You have to double tap to run in a metroidvania game. Sure, Richter did it but that's because of his classicvania roots, and even then Richter controllers are both better and useful, unlike Nathan's. Exploring with Nathan is a pain because with Richter you didn't even need to explore, while with Nathan is somewhat mandatory. But did I say exploration? In a Castle so empty that there are more empty and dead end halls than in-game items?
The only 2 good things about CotM is the cards system and Dracula's fight, because everything else is shit, HoD, as unpolished as it was, it was an step forward, even if marginally, and the music sure as hell is better.

There are mods to get rid of it now.

For Metroidvania it have to be either SOTN of AoS, the former is bigger but it doesn't grab you by the hand, and the later is a bit smaller, but it's easier to progress.
For classicvania you have Castlevania 3, Super Castlevania 4 and after that give them hell with the original or Rondo of Blood.

Castlevania 1 on nes is a good way to start, if the controls feels too clunky I guess you could try Super Castlevania IV. As for metroidvania start with SotN and play them in cronological order.

God damn, the way Alucard animates in this game is so fucking cool.

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Nah

If you fucks are gonna be inside during the solar eclipse, then you are pathetic.

Which reminds me, long ago someone said that floppy discs uh… discs could be used to look at an eclipse.

If you weren't a shitty millenial, the marks left by waiting years between each game wouldn't have left you so spoiled that you overinflate the relevance of flaws to the point they're gamechangers.

Stick to HG101, we both know you're going to level up to SJW eventually.

What?
But they're pozzed too

Aria of Sorrow didnt have as good a magic system, nor the weapon alt attacks that made SotN so fun.

For being in a GBA, a handheld a lot less powerful than the PS1, AoS rival it, which says a lot. SotN have a lot of secret inputs and little secrets that makes it worth it, but AoS is better for being in the GBA alone, it also had a few souls combination that are as good if not more than the weapon secrets in SotN.
The SotN magic system was kind of useless and it made the game even easier. The mods makes this a bit less cheesy, but still.

Legitimately who gives a fuck?

It's something that doesn't happen often. You can live an entire life without experiencing it. Sure, missing it will not change a lot of things, but you will never experience it again, and depending on where you are, you might not experience it the same way if it happens again.
It's not like you have to stop doing whatever you are doing, it takes a few minutes to see it so you can go back to your pathetic cave.

Oh man, you're so right, how could I ever miss out on a shadow moving across the face of the earth!!!

AoS lied to me. I saw no castle in the eclipse.

As the lore goes, the eclipse probably meant the birth of the Dark Lord, for the power escaping from it or something like that.

Never had a problem with them. Quit being a shitter.
You're fucking deaf if you think this.

I used to think N64 controllers were ok, and they kinda are, but now that there are better controller layouts, they are just retarded, same with things like Alone in the Dark original controllers. My point being that you're a faggot.
This was all fixed in HoD.
Circle of the Moon soundtrack is mostly remix that you heard in a mediocre sound chip from the GBA. If you can't appreciate chiptunes, you might as well fuck off.

As someone whose fiddled with Sappy for a good while, it's true. But at the same time if you can stand listening to GBC music, than it really isn't that bad. Considering all the audio gets compressed to high heaven anyway it's hard to really appreciate whats being done in the first place.

SotN has a way better Belmont mode (why Julius doesn't work off of Richter's hearts and item crash system is fucking beyond me) but in comparison that and looking prettier are its main edge-overs if you ask me.

On a galactic scale it means nothing, you only care because you're a retarded monkey. By the way they've already announced there is another happening in our lifetime.

On a galactic scale, neither do your life. Not all planets have satellites that perfectly fits the circumference of their stars. and it's something that can only be appreciated on certain points of the planet only and for brief minutes.
But nope, let's ignore it because I have more important things to do like posting on Holla Forums. You don't care because you think you're better, which only makes you a contrarian on the fact that your life is as meaningless as anyone else's and small things like this, to share them with friends, is what gives life enough meaning to make it bearable.
No shit, good look appreciating the next eclipse in Japan. 俺はします

The GBA has no dedicated sound hardware. All sounds must divert power from the CPU. Between this and cart space you can't have a high quality sound font and fast gameplay as the main CPU has to uncompress and process sounds for that.

This is why all the best GBA music is from CPU light games (turn based) and sections/scenes (cutscenes, peaceful areas, that one karaoke mode in Wario Land 4). One of the most extreme examples is Max Payne GBA which has some damn impressive voice recordings for the system, but only plays them over still background images.

SoTN was made back in the 90s when vampires were still unironically cool as fuck.

The next American eclipse is in 2024. You know absolutely nothing and it's hilarious how assblasted me not giving a fuck about a shadow is making you.

And yet you keep coming back. Good luck not having friends.