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Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is the latest refinement of the horror-platform-game mould first cast by Symphony of the Night, released for the PlayStation in 1997. That game took Castlevania away from the left-to-right platformer it had been since its inception in 1986, and turned it into a Metroid-style non-linear adventure. In these games, the player explores the game world, defeating enemies along the way. Defeating bosses often grants new abilities, which allow access to previously unreachable areas. And so the game goes on, until the entirety of the castle has been explored, and the final villain defeated.
In Dawn of Sorrow, you resume the role of Soma Cruz, a high school student who in the previous GameBoy Advance game Aria of Sorrow found himself battling forces of darkness. Dracula, Castlevania's traditional foe, is now long gone. But the question of who shall succeed him is unanswered. In Aria of Sorrow, it turned out that Soma himself was Dracula's heir, but he resisted his fate. Now he has returned to stop anyone else from doing the same. The plot is, by and large, a little silly and awfully melodramatic. But in a series with subtitles such as "Aria of Sorrow", "Symphony of the Night" and "Harmony of Dissonance", what else would you expect?
Dawn of Sorrow is not what you'd expect of a videogame circa 2005, that's for sure. There's no licensed soundtrack, no famous voice cast, and no photorealistic 3D backdrops. Instead, it shows off huge catalogues of equipment, RPG-like statistics, and an element of obsessive item-collection. Given that, you might not expect that it's brilliant. But it is. Dawn of Sorrow has a strange kind of purity. If you've mainly existed on a diet of 3D action games, the lack of camera-wrangling might come as a revelation. The player is never fighting the game engine, just the enemies in the game world. Soma responds deftly to your commands, and whilst he seems a little unathletic to begin with, he acquires abilities throughout the game that make him positively acrobatic.
The game's bosses are the ultimate expression of this plainness of design. Difficult, but never unfair, they attack in identifiable routines, always telegraphing their moves in advance. When you fail, it's because you forgot the pattern - not because you were cheated. And it's that - the emphasis that one was beaten by a system, not by luck - that encourages the player not to give up, but to hammer the A button and start again. It's only when you defeat a boss that an irksome catch appears - the player must draw a "Magic Seal" on the touchscreen to defeat the boss forever. Succeed in quickly drawing the (increasingly more complex) geometric figure, and you banish the boss forever; fail, and it regains some health, and your ordeal begins again.
It's often difficult juggling a stylus and the more conventional game controls, and it feels a mite tacked-on. And that's one complaint that can perhaps be brought against Dawn of Sorrow - that it fails to make best use of the DS's unique features. Apart from the seals, the touchscreen is only used for a few very token actions such as clearing frozen blocks, or directing friendly creatures. It feels more like a jazzed-up GameBoy Advance game than a DS game in its own right. Still, the game does make excellent use of the second screen, which can be toggled between a quick stats display, and a map of the castle. Having the latter is a great relief compared to the constant toggling of displays necessary in earlier Castlevanias.
The map is vital given the exploration-based nature of the game. There is a fair deal of backtracking necessary to progress, but it never becomes a chore. Carefully spaced warp points speed up the process, and as Soma's statistics grow with experience, previously powerful enemies that you'd have tried to avoid become pushovers. After defeating each boss, the path ahead often seems unclear – but soon, you'll remember an obstacle that you can now overcome (that top-screen map coming into its own again) and eagerly set off again. If RPG-like elements tend to put you off, don't let them with this game. There are statistics, but they're simple, and as long as you keep the numbers higher rather than lower, you'll be fine. If the game resembles any modern RPG, then it's not Final Fantasy, but Pokemon.
It resembles Pokemon because of its system of "souls". Each enemy may, when killed, drop its soul. Some enemies are less likely to give up their souls, so it may be a while before a player acquires the rarest souls. Once acquired, souls grant Soma new abilites - some allow new attacks, whilst others give him new abilities or boost his statistics. Souls can also be fused to weapons - thereby losing the soul itself - in order to upgrade them. The player is constantly forced to balance: fuse this rare soul to a weapon, or keep it for its innate power? A few souls are crucial to completing the game, but in general, they're more useful for synthesis. Still, collecting them all will keep many players very occupied - and if you're still having trouble, you can swap souls with a friend over the wireless link.
The game's graphics are beautiful. If modern video games are Toy Story, then this is Snow White, eschewing computer-generation for painstaking hand-animation. The bosses fill the screen, vividly characterised with bulging eyeballs, rotting flesh, and crimson blood, perfectly representing the Castlevania aesthetic of ghoulish over gory. Think Hammer House of Horror, not Wes Craven. But it's not just the creatures that are beautiful. Each area of the castle has its own character and is lovingly rendered, from the paintings and abandoned dolls in the Demon Guest House, to the swinging pendulums and bloodied traps in the Cursed Clock Tower. If there's any weak spot in the art, it's the slightly generic manga-stylings applied to the character portraits.
This is a game to be dipped into, to be savoured. And even though I suggested that it failed to exploit many of the DS's unique features, it redeems itself by being perfectly suited to the real killer feature of the DS: the fact it's a handheld. That savouring becomes effortless when you can do it anywhere, any time, with practically no loading times. Short bursts of play are often just as rewarding as long slogs. The game's joy is that it can be approached however you wish: a five-minute session might hint at the next path to take; 25 minutes might lead to a new save point; and an hour or two might see a few bosses fall.
And when you notice your thumbs are numb, and that you've been playing all night, that's when you understand just how good Dawn of Sorrow is. I nearly gave the game an eight, given that it's really only gilding the lily of an eight-year-old formula - but how could I, when it gives me a nine-sized grin every time I play it?
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