Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Franchise gaming can be a precarious endeavor for a fanboy. We desperately wish to recapture that magic that we felt the first time we played that franchise, and at the same time we want it to evolve and change into something that will surprise and thrill us.

Such is the case with Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, which turns out to be an excellent title, not to be missed by fans of the franchise. Nonetheless, it is not the transcendent experience Koji Igarashi has been striving for from his unenviable position as the current master of Castlevania. I would recommend Portrait to anyone with even a passing interest in Castlevania games, but not to those who haven’t been captured by the series in the past.

Portrait is much, much more of the same we’ve been seeing in Castlevania up to this point. That is to say, huge areas, phenomenal graphics, remarkably brilliant music, and near flawless play control. Unfortunately, that also means clumsy localization, and a game design that would be unfriendly to Castlevania’s uninitiate. This is a crucial flaw to the series. Recent interviews with Koji Igarashi seem to indicate that he’s trying to stretch the series to gain a broader audience, but I have a hard time believing this game will reach outside of the franchise’s core audience.

For those of us who love everything Castlevania, that’s absolute nectar. But for everyone else, perhaps not so much.

That said, this game is as good as it gets. A big, elaborate story with a handful of surprising NPCs with questionable histories and motives, many brand new enemies we’ve never seen before as well as redesigns of classic enemies and surprising returns of episode-specific boss battles, and at the risk of spoiling a minor detail, the return of the “Symphony of the Night” personality for everyone’s favorite force of nature, Death.

The two-character mechanic seems like a nuisance early on, just as the difficulty level takes quite some time to ramp up, but when you start to grasp just how large this game is, you’ll understand that it’s got a lot of time to get a lot more challenging, and it does exactly that. Towards the end I was loading up on restorative items just to survive stretches of the game between save points, and I consider myself quite skilled at these games.

The collection in this game is way over the top. Just about everything has a percentage attached, including items found in the game. At completion, I had over 80% of the items found, despite having found every room and collecting every item that can be dropped by an enemy. This game is really, really big.

On top of the brilliant design, completing the game will unlock two more pairs of characters to work with, including two of the NPCs in the game and a pair of classic characters who are over a century from their natural timeline, which is a little bit strange.

In the end, I give Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin a four out of five if you’re the average gamer. It gets a perfect score for Castlevania junkies like yours truly.