Igarashi’s Castlevania – Extended Ranking and Discussion

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/acfibm/extended_discussion_and_ranking_of_the_igavania/

I’m a longtime fan of the Castlevania series, particularly in the “Igavania” tradition, named for the direction Koji Igarashi moved the series with the acclaimed 1997 title Symphony of the Night. While the Castlevania series was previously about sidescrolling combat and platforming action in a (mostly) linear progression of challenging stages, Igarashi sought to introduce nonlinear exploration and RPG elements to add to the longevity and replayability of the game (this was something that had actually been attempted before with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, though its execution left a lot to be desired). Comparisons of Symphony of the Night with Super Metroid led to the portmanteau “Metroidvania” to distinguish the new style of gameplay from the original formula, with some citing its origins as a pejorative term by series fans dissatisfied with the new direction. These days, Metroidvania has become a blanket term for any (usually 2D side-scrolling) game with Metroid-like world progression gated by player abilities, with nothing uniquely associated with Castlevania. That’s a shame, because there are several elements that set Igarashi’s Castlevania games apart from Metroid — most notably, a strong focus on action RPG combat featuring a broad toolset that encourages player expression and creativity. For the record, Hollow Knight is one of few games that I think earns the Metroidvania label in full, and while Dark Souls has little in the way of character ability progression or platforming, it’s more spiritually in tune with Symphony of the Night’s design principles as an action RPG than a Super Metroid clone like Axiom Verge is. Exploring the game world and uncovering secrets, fighting a large bestiary of enemies and tough bosses, leveling up, finding new gear, and developing a playstyle based on a wide suite of combat options all feels very similar to the latter-day Castlevania games.

In any case, what follows is an extended ranking and discussion of the mainline Castlevania titles from 1997’s Symphony of the Night up through 2008’s Order of Ecclesia. I call these “Igavanias” to clearly distinguish them from the “Classicvania” tradition and to avoid confusion with the common usage of the Metroidvania label. I’ll be posting some of my thoughts on the Bloodstained games in the future. If you’re new to the Castlevania series and are completely lost, I’d recommend you stop reading now and play the games in the following order: Symphony of the Night -> Aria of Sorrow -> Dawn of Sorrow -> Portrait of Ruin -> Order of Ecclesia -> (optional) Circle of the Moon/Harmony of Dissonance. This is essentially release order, but saving the more controversial GBA titles for later and maintaining a smooth difficulty ramp.

7. Harmony of Dissonance. Pulling up the rear, we have Igarashi’s return to directing Castlevania after the GBA launch title, Circle of the Moon. It’s perhaps due to its rushed development and awkward transition to the new platform that the game takes as many steps back as it does forward. It’s not a bad game by any means — Iga’s hand can be felt from the start with more flexible and responsive movement (I hope you liked backdash spamming in SOTN!), wonderful enemy sprites, and expressive mechanics that afford the player a lot of ways to tackle combat. The magic system is easily the best part of the game, and finally makes the Classicvania subweapon system feel like a natural rather than vestigial inclusion into the Igavania gameplay formula. By combining subweapons with one of five elemental spellbooks, you can perform highly varied magical attacks, from whirlwinds of flame to homing shards of ice and more. It’s a joy to find new spellbooks (though they’re stretched a bit thin near the end) and experiment with different subweapon combinations (there are 35 in total!), and for the first time ever I was always happy to pick up a new subweapon for the opportunity to do so, unlike in SotN where I always lament having my holy water drop off the stage in return for a ricochet rock. This amount of freedom comes at the cost of difficulty, however; particularly the bosses which are at the level of the worst SotN had to offer where you can just spam spells until “Giant [Generic Enemy]” dies without any need to learn their moveset. There are at least three decent ones, but it’s nothing too memorable. Speaking of bosses, progression through the castle often felt a bit weird, as half the time I would get to a new area, kill a boss and find myself at a pointless dead end and have to double back — the boring set of abilities that gate progression don’t help matters either. There’s almost nothing beyond your standard double jump, crouch slide, and high jump, other than some extremely specific key items that you have to equip for a new “ability” which amounts to little more than a key for a particular type of lock. This doesn’t mean exploration itself is unsatisfying — especially in the early areas, there’s a good deal of nonlinearity and optional content. I was particularly impressed with some of tougher one-off enemies you can choose to fight and a few that actually doubled as puzzle solutions, which I’ve never seen in any of Igarashi’s games before. The game’s A/B castle gimmick also tests the player’s navigational skills to a greater extent than most other games in the genre. Gear is rewarding, but not always interesting — all of the whip upgrades are boring, and most equipment just modulates stats, but at least it’s fairly balanced. The shop is a totally pointless inclusion, as there’s nothing exciting to buy and you get far too much money for potions, which are basically unlimited in your inventory, to be of any concern (I just restricted my own use here to maintain an acceptable level of challenge). Finally, I have to talk about the music. It’s some of the worst in the series. From what I’ve heard, this was a technical limitation imposed by the short development time, as the team was focused on providing a more vibrant visual experience after Circle of the Moon was so difficult to make out on the unlit original GBA screen. They generally succeeded in this task, and the game’s backgrounds, sprites, and animations are quite splendid, but the tunes sound worse than anything on the NES. I haven’t tried the Hard mode, but I’m fairly confident that it effectively alleviates my balance and difficulty concerns, and the alternate Maxim mode adds some replayability as well. I’d certainly recommend this game to any fans, as it has some noteworthy ideas and decent execution, but not without some caveats.

6. Dawn of Sorrow. This is the first Castlevania I played, and while I think it was a great introduction to the series it had some major flaws that held it back. Greatest and most difficult to articulate of my criticisms is that the exploration in the castle can feel rather mundane. There are some good areas, but much of the castle fails to be memorable for me, for various reasons. The Demon Guest House takes up so much of the castle with repeated rooms, Garden of Madness lives up the its name with the amount of Une-clearing you’ll be doing, and I can barely recall much of the lower castle (Subterranean Hell, Silenced Ruins, the lower part of The Dark Chapel). The upper castle is where it’s at — Cursed Clock Tower meets the series’ standards of a challenging spike-infested gauntlet with Medusa Heads abound, the Pinnacle is a grand ascent to the throne room, and Condemned Tower is one of my favorite levels in any CV with tough enemies in a vertical environment, no save room until the top, and the epic Gergoth fight changing the level permanently, forcing you to go all the way back up to save. For what it’s worth, the gameplay formula is still very solid, and I like the progression of abilities, the enemy and encounter designs, and most of the bosses are great, if marred by the awful touch-screen quick time event required to finish them. The soul system is back from Aria of Sorrow, and adds a lot of depth and variety in the form of spells, summoned familiars, transformations, and passive stat bonuses or perks. The game is not always difficult enough to encourage experimentation, but there’s a lot of fun to be had for the inquisitive player. One thing it has over the rest of the series is that there’s some actual commitment to a “build” in the form of the weapon enchantment system, which requires you to give up enemy souls to level up various weapons. But as great as this concept is, it also contributes to the terrible endgame. Three of the 9 weapon types have killer final upgrades (Claimh Solais, Death’s Scythe, and Muramasa), while the others are weird sidegrades or screw you for choosing to invest in ultimately inferior weapon types — Valmanway (SotN’s Crissaegrim) is an insult to players who actually liked the short sword’s moveset, the whip sword Nebula suffers from low damage so as to make rapier investment pointless, Mjollnjr and Gugner do specialized lightning damage and require the player to confirm multiple ticks of damage per hit to surpass their preceding upgrades, and Cinquedia does too low damage to justify its short range (EDIT: and I forgot about fists. I always forget about fists). Add on the fact that Mine of Judgment and The Abyss are boring, uninspired levels and the final boss is garbage and the game leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth on replay. One final criticism is that the game doesn’t feature a real Hard Mode to alleviate the game’s low difficulty. In my mind, there are two proper designs for Hard Mode in CV: either NG+ and Max Level 1 so you have to optimize your setup, or uncapped Hard Mode with no item transfer. Dawn of Sorrow features neither, with an uncapped Hard Mode only accessible from the NG+ Clear menu. My recommendation is to throw away all of your souls, weapons, and gold and then start Hard Mode for a proper challenging experience — I just did this last month and the overall design and difficulty curve is fantastic, despite my preceding gripes. I was actually experimenting with a variety of soul and weapon combos and perfecting animation cancels to survive. Also nice is the Julius Mode, which offers some additional Classicvania-style replayability in a more condensed, challenging experience.

5. Circle of the Moon. This is the underdog pick among many latter-day Castlevania fans, and I can see both sides of why. It’s curiously the only one without any input from Iga, instead developed by Koname’s Kobe department as a launch title for the GBA. It still takes a lot of inspiration from Symphony of the Night for its overall design direction, but its individual elements play out quite differently. Notably, it features Classicvania-style deliberate movement, where you have to commit to jump arcs and you can’t simply cancel one animation into the next. The game’s challenges are built around this stiffer (and sometimes clunkier) style of gameplay, requiring more patience and caution from the player, and the game can actually be quite difficult. Enemies are aggressive, platforming often requires careful inputs, and many of the bosses are a true test of determination and skill (the twin Dragon Zombies are a definite highlight). However, this is still an action (j)RPG, and the player has more options than the old whip and set of subweapons. One of the coolest features of the game is its unique magic system, where the player can activate combinations of cards (one “action” and one “elemental”) with a wide array of different effects, from the straightforward addition of elemental modifiers to the whip to more interesting effects like replacing the whip attack with a flaming sword or flurry of fists, creating protective magical auras, or summoning powerful mythological creatures to attack. I found it absolutely necessary to experiment with these options to make it through many of the tougher enemy layouts and punishing bosses in the game, and I felt very rewarded for doing so. However, the magic system’s greatness is hugely diminished by one of the game’s biggest flaws, namely its obscenely low drop rates for items. Every single card must be obtained from a particular enemy (some of whom are rather uncommon), with some chances starting as low as 0.4% and most starting below 2%, proportionally increasing with your luck stat at a very slow rate. The same is true for healing items and equipment. In practice, this means that without targeted grinding, you will end up with around half of the cards and around a dozen healing potions for the entire game — I fortuitously saved almost all of mine for the insanely hard Dracula bossfight, for which they proved absolutely essential. I have no clue what most of the card combinations are, because I only got 4 of the 10 action cards and 8 of the 10 elemental cards (the latter of which are less inherently interesting). Perhaps there was an expectation that players would grind for items and levels, but this is anathema to the organic experience I am accustomed to, and I personally feel it’s a massive point against the game. It would have been much better to have a selection of cards as rewards for exploration. Happily, most of the rest of the experience is extremely well designed, with an excellent sense of progression, a fun and marginally interesting set of player upgrades, and many opportunities for optional exploration. One of my favorite aspects of the world design is that new enemies are actually added to earlier areas as you defeat more bosses, ensuring that backtracking through previous areas is never dull despite your increasing character strength. Though it can be quite fun to effortlessly blast through areas that once gave you trouble, it’s interesting to see a Metroidvania more focused on challenging sidescrolling action go this route to make up for its more understated character transformation. There are also several interesting alternate modes available when you beat the game, which trade off your character’s base stats and stat growths (thus functioning as a Hard mode of sorts) for expanded subweapon strength, magical ability, raw fighting power, or a wildly amplified luck stat (!!!). I think CotM is a great entry to the series, but I’d only recommend it to fans who are looking for a stiff challenge and don’t mind a few stumbling blocks in the gameplay.

4. Symphony of the Night. This will sound blasphemous, but I don’t think this is the best of Igarashi’s work. The game is definitely impressive, and deserving of being enshrined in history as foundational to a genre, but boy is it far from perfect. While the level design is mostly fantastic (I think the Inverted Castle holds up too), enemies are well designed, the ability progression is legendary, and the game is chock full of interesting systems and hidden secrets, its kitchen sink design ends up springing a few leaks. While I applaud that there are six different methods of attack (weapon, subweapon, one-time use equippables, spells, familiars, and transformations), none of them are fleshed out as they could have been, and were in subsequent entries. Most of the weapons use the same movesets with clearly superior choices, often making the items found in exploration disappointing. Konami was right to change the subweapon system in later entries IMO, because accidentally dropping that timestop or holy water for a ricochet rock is endlessly frustrating, and experimentation often feels discouraged. I like the spells, but find the fighting-game combos a bit obtuse. The equippable attacks are mostly shit except for the pentagram, which still can’t escape feeling like a waste whenever it’s used. Familiars are interesting, but it’s a bit hard to know which one to invest in because they do almost nothing without a few level ups. The transformations are a ton of fun to use, but also led to me wolf sprinting, bat flying, and mist floating past most enemies when I was trying to fill out the Inverted Castle. There are some mechanics that I miss in the newer games, like how healing items have to be used in real game time rather than from the pause menu, but overall I think the series has improved mechanically since. However, if I were to criticize anything in the game, it’s the boss design. I’m sorry, but the majority of bosses in this game are terrible. Slogra and Gaibon are a good introduction, but it’s mostly downhill from there. Most bosses can be totally cheesed, to the point that I never once saw Malphas’ moveset — the instant I walked into the room, I stunlocked him into the upper left hand corner with my sword. I threw 100 knives at Scylla for a 20 second kill. Galamoth virtually requires you to find the ring that heals you from lightning. I don’t even remember fighting Death, Medusa, Succubus, the Hippogryph, The Creature, Olrox, Mummy, Cerberus, or the Lesser Demon. The best bosses are Legion, Richter, Beelzebub, Doppelganger, and Fake Trevor/Grant/Sypha, but even these don’t measure up to the bosses of later games. Most of the rest are just a DPS race that rarely offers any real challenge and can be over in seconds. The game is also just too easy on the whole, with most enemies going down in 1 or 2 hits. Despite all of this, SotN still comes out as much greater than the sum of its parts. The sprawling castle design is full of memorable areas and optional paths, with something interesting around every corner and plenty of curiosities in the world as well as the mechanics for the player to discover. It’s a joy to sit back with some smooth jazz and explore the castle, fight enemies, explore weapon and equipment combos, get a New York style pizza from a frog, and conquer your daddy issues in this glorious gothic retelling of Oedipus through stat-driven combat and platforming. Definitely a classic.

3. Order of Ecclesia. This game may be the most of a mixed bag of any Castlevania I’ve played, but its challenge really holds it up. Enemies kick your ass, healing items are rare, and the bosses are the best CV bosses by a mile. Nothing matches the satisfaction of learning and moving in tune with a boss’ attack patterns to fell the giant beast. Anyone who has played this game will likely have extremely fond memories of finally crushing that goddamn crab boss with a freaking elevator. Nearly every boss matches this high standard of tense challenge without ever veering into a DPS race with undodgeable attacks, and the result is always rewarding. Over several playthroughs I’ve managed to attain the boss medal for most bosses (requires taking no damage), which is not a consequence of any sort of achievement-whoring tendency I don’t have, but rather a testament to the boss design and how it encourages you to step up your game or be brushed aside. The game still has its fair share of problems, though. The level design before the reveal of Dracula’s Castle is mostly trash, with repetitive linear levels that seem to be attempting to ape Classicvanias but to rather banal effect. The opening bits of the Castle are a welcome change in pace, with some really wacky and tough intro areas that earlier games could never pull off due to the requirement that the Castle entrance serve as a tutorial, but this inspired design starts to wane and many of the final areas of the castle are totally forgettable, with little of the ability-based progression that helps make the genre so compelling. The combat system is also much shallower than previous entries, despite what it may seem. There’s rarely a good reason to equip a different glyph in each hand, and there are a few obvious best choices with only minor differences in attack animations. While the swift attacks and stamina system make OoE a very competent action game, its RPG side takes a big hit. Spells disappear in midair when you switch loadouts, so you can’t easily chain them with melee attacks, and the spells themselves are slow and inconsistent with long post-cast internal cooldowns. The glyph union system sounds cool at first, but since save rooms do not replenish hearts as they did mana in other games, they’re always best saved for spamming the boss. Another annoyance is the tedious villager quests, which require you to do kill X monsters or find some random ingredient so you can finally buy potions. The game’s bonus content is also mediocre, with a decent platforming gauntlet in the form of Training Hall, a slapped together Classicvania-styled Albus mode (featuring machine gun pistoling and weird hitboxes), and a truly awful combat-oriented bonus level, Large Cavern, which exists only to see how long you’re willing to wait for Refectio to slowly heal you between bullshit rooms that make up what I guess is the CV equivalent to bullet hell. I can certainly see why OoE is the favorite of many — it has the most hardcore challenge, excellent platforming and action mechanics, and a fresh art style to offset the anime look of the prior DS titles. The Hard Mode steps it up yet another notch. But to me, too much was sliced away to create what is admittedly a tighter game.

2. Aria of Sorrow. I was very surprised by how much I loved this game, considering how lowly I’ve ranked its direct sequel. At first I wasn’t really seeing what all the fuss was about, since in the beginning it just feels like Dawn of Sorrow with slightly worse mechanics (principally in the weapon types, the balance and progression of which was perfected by DoS and PoR in terms of attack patterns, animation cancels, elemental modifiers, and raw numbers). But damn, it really shoots up in quality past the first 25% of the game or so. From all of the praise it gets, I was expecting it to be a superior realization of Dawn of Sorrow’s concept, but I think it’s more fair to say that it’s a more direct advancement from Symphony of the Night, with DoS as a somewhat awkward middle child between it and Portrait of Ruin. While SotN has a broader set of mechanics and is generally more nonlinear (more than any entry that followed, really), there’s a lot of content that doesn’t actually add much meaningful variety. Aria of Sorrow finally nails these aspects with a castle that has a lot of optional routes and areas to explore with a steady ramp in difficulty and a way of giving the player rewarding new combat options no matter how they tackle it. I started to really notice this when I got the Underground Reservoir, where you can branch off of the critical path into the Underground Cemetary. This is where things gets interesting — fighting the bonus boss there rewards you with a very powerful attack soul, as well as a non-critical ability which grants you access a secret area in another part of the castle containing a very powerful magical sword. One or both of these will be very useful for the next critical area, The Arena, which features a big spike in difficulty that will cause many players to turn back in search for more powerful gear. The bonus boss isn’t their only option, though — I didn’t think to explore the secret part of the castle and instead purchased a powerful sword from the shop with all of the gold I had. There are also some decently powerful weapons in the surrounding areas and dropped by enemies, which may be good enough for players brave enough to make do with slightly lower damage — the same goes for the suite of combat souls the player will have acquired randomly from certain enemies, which the player can choose to rely on more if they spec their gear towards INT and mana regeneration. There’s even another secret area off of the Underground Reservoir that requires clever soul combinations to get to, containing two of the best weapons in the game. For players making do with subpar gear, there are several extremely powerful weapons locked behind optional challenges or dropped by enemies, ensuring that nearly every player should be working with something good for the final areas to come. Impressively, too, all of these lategame options are distinctly useful; though the sword I bought boasted the highest raw damage, its short attack pattern and lack of any bonus effects prompted me to swap it out for one of five other weapons as the situation demanded — the same was also true for my soul setup. The magic soul system really does elevate the experience; there are inevitably some clunkers as all but 3 of the 113 enemies can drop a soul, but overall the system adds a lot of variety and depth to the experience, with many opportunities for experimentation and expression. It also surprisingly made me identify with the shonen anime-tier narrative on a deeper level than I would have ever anticipated. I already knew the big twist since I played DoS first, but I had a moment where I actually felt like I was becoming the Dark Lord when I found myself transforming into a bat and launching hellfire at my enemies. The endgame abilities are a blast to play with, and I was genuinely excited when the I found the last ancient hint book, confronted the wannabe Graham Jones with my completed set of vampiric powers, became the first ever incarnation of Vlad Tepes to defeat a Belmont, and rushed through the final gauntlet in the Chaotic Realm. I can’t remember the last time a game made me feel this giddy upon obtaining a new item or powerup. I’m looking forward to diving into the Hard mode and Julius mode in the future, as my brief trials of both were very promising. A must-play for any Metroidvania fan.

1. Portrait of Ruin. This, to me, is the peak Castlevania experience. Exploration in a sprawling castle gated through player abilities, challenging and varied enemy and boss encounters, kitchen sink approach to combat design, and an upbeat gothic style. Here it’s just refined to a gold standard. Swapping between the two characters gives you totally different flavors of combat, allowing you to play as the swiss army knife of vampire hunters in Jonathan or as a fully realized spellcaster, a wellspring of untapped potential since Dracula’s Curse, in Charlotte. Jonathan’s moveset is the most expansive of any Castlevania, with whips, knives, short swords, great swords, axes, spears, and fists competently represented alongside the full set of (finally) equippable subweapons. Though it involves a good bit of spell swapping in the pause menu, spellcasting is a very fun way to engage enemies, requiring you to stand uninterrupted in place long enough to deliver a specialized type of damage in a unique package, whether it be a quick burst of fire, cutting winds with a slightly homing arc, a beam of light, shards of ice, chain lightning, a burst of poison bubbles, and many others. You’re also encouraged to use both characters together, supplementing your current avatar’s moveset with the other’s spells or subweapons, or employ a combined Dual Crush attack (more on that later). Exploration in the castle is supplemented with cursed paintings, which are huge levels in and of themselves and allow the game to explore unique locales with appropriately chosen monsters to fill out a fever dream of a Victorian city, a buried Egyptian pyramid, an academy for witchcraft, and a gravity-defying madhouse warped over on itself. Remixed version of these levels serve as this game’s “Inverted Castle”, which keeps the main Castle elegant and precise. After the first few areas, the Castle opens up to nonlinear progression in the sprawling Great Stairway level reminiscent of SotN’s Marble Gallery, with a great sense of freedom and discovery as you find items and abilities needed to make your way further up the castle into perhaps the most challenging iteration of a Clock Tower yet. This leads us to the bosses, since PoR features my favorite Death fight in any CV game. Many bosses encourage experimentation with the two-character system without feeling contrived. They’re open to a wide variety of approaches without being exploitable like SotN’s, and they’re challenging without requiring OoE’s almost rhythm game-like precision. While not every boss is as memorable as some in the series’ past, there are some excellent fights here, especially against classic horror staples (The Werewolf, The Mummy, the Creature of Frankensteinian origins, and Medusa) and against the game’s main villains – Death, the vampire painter Brauner, and tag team battles against Stella + Loretta and Dracula + Death make for very satisfying fights. Completing various quests through exploration will net you new weapons and abilities, and unlock the fantastic bonus area, Nest of Evil. While it’s the same fundamental idea as OoE’s dreadful Large Cavern, here it’s actually a ton of fun, with tough yet fair sequences of enemy encounters culminating in some fun reprisals of bosses from prior games (five Dawn of Sorrow bosses, Doppelganger, and Fake Trevor/Grant/Sypha all make a return here), all with reasonable checkpoints. The rest of the game’s bonus content is great too, with the ability to replay the game as Stella + Loretta, Richter + Maria, or even an Old Axe Armor for some reason. The Hard Mode is also expertly designed here, requiring mastery of the mechanics and their interactions, and since Dual Crush damage scales with level, that newb crutch is useless at Max Level 1. I honestly find it hard to come up with significant criticisms for this game — there’s plenty to nitpick about any game as complex as these, but I truly think Portrait of Ruin is the best CV package, with wonderful depth and almost no clutter. It’s goddamn fantastic.