castlevania: portrait of ruin

The Castlevania legacy is long running. The game started many years ago on the NES, helped to sell the SNES in its early days and has had installments on most other platforms since then. Portrait of Ruin is the second installment on the DS (with the third one already available by now) and helps to keep up the good name of the series.

Many things have changed since I last played a Castlevania game. The SNES version was a pretty simple side scrolling platform game, with a few alternate roads and bosses, but that was pretty much it. Portrait of Ruin on the other hand sports two playable characters, a whole stat system, a full wardrobe of equipment for both characters, tons of special weapons and abilities, big maps instead of simple left-to-right levels and even some puzzles that need solving before the next portion of the game becomes available.

On top of that, there are about 35 quests which can be finished separate from the main storyline, one quest in particular opening a whole new map to explore. And when finishing the game or getting certain %s of game completion, new game modes pop up from nowhere. It's obvious the makers spent a lot of time cranking up the replay value of this game, and they did a pretty fine job too.

Not a bad thing, because the difficulty level of PoR is rather low. The main areas and maps are pretty easy to navigate, and while some enemies look pretty big and menacing, most of them can be killed with a few well-timed slashes of your whip, club or sword. The bosses are a tad harder, but once you master their patterns they pose little trouble in defeating them. Before every boss there's also a neat save spot, so you won't need to travel big distances before having another go at a boss battle.

The game looks pretty nice, with varied locations and neat little graphical details. Near the end the graphics do become a little repetitive, with settings and enemies being revisited sporting little tweaks. Still, the game is very nice to look at, especially the bigger enemies in the game are quite something to behold. The sound, again, is less compelling. The music and sound effects aren't really bad, but become repetitive rather quickly. So like most DS games, I played through the game with muted sound.

The gameplay requires some getting used to, the Belmonts (and Morrises too it seems) have never been the most agile of gaming characters. But once you get the hang of it, there's plenty you can do with your characters, from sliding, double jumping to dodging and switching characters. Your character can be equipped with a range of gear, sometimes giving them unique abilities. A nice addition, though in the end I think they overdid it a little. There are just too many different types of gear, too many abilities with too many unique specifics to work in what is basically an expanded platform game. It's not as if a new weapon is always better than the one before, so there's some planning and weighing to be done when reequipping your characters.

Same goes for the quests. A very cool addition, but with more than 30 quests you sometimes tend to forget about the main storyline. Also, some quests require you to find unique items. Items that can be sold for money. If you do so, there's no way to complete the quest anymore, and since there are only 5 quests active at the same time, you can get stuck with the whole quest sideshow. This is a good learning school if you want to play through the game again, but sadly I don't have the time for such things anymore. It's a shame I had to miss out on a portion of the game just because I was a little careless in the beginning.

All things considered though, Portrait of Ruin is a great addition to the Castlevania series. It's only my urge to get 100% out of game that kinda failed the game at some points, as it is really constructed to have as much replay value as possible. It's hard to fault it for that, though the game itself could've been a bit more restrictive in some places (making it harder or impossible to sell unique items for example).

I finished the game in a good 12 hours, which is decent enough for a platform game. The difficulty level isn't too high and only the bosses will pose a threat, apart from that there is plenty of exploring to do and many things to discover and to try out. It's a neat mix of platform gaming and adventuring, somewhat resembling the idea behind Simon's Quest on the NES, but executed a whole lot better.

If you'd rather take a look for yourself, there a cool trailer to suit your needs.