Second Spin: Dawn of Sorrow
After you beat Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow the first time, a second way to play through the game is unlocked. As with most Castlevania games since 1997, you get different characters to play through the same castle, fighting the same bosses, without the dialog and storyline. And just as with Aria of Sorrow, Dawn’s GBA prequel, the mode is called “Julius Mode,” which refers to Julius Belmont, the aging “last Belmont” who’s lost his memory and identity in the first game. Oh yeah, uh, spoiler alert. Sorry.
When you start Julius Mode, you’ve got the abilities to reach nearly every part of the castle, and as you meet and team up with Yoko Belnades and Alucard at specific points in the castle, the rest of the castle becomes accessible.
Clearly, a lot of time went into planning Julius Mode in Dawn of Sorrow, and it exudes a definite sense of Castlevania III’s character-swapping dynamic, except this time around you actually need the other characters. The presence of this in the game is not surprising, because series director since Symphony of the Night Koji Igarashi has said that his favorite Castlevania was the one we know in the US as Castlevania III. In the initial playthrough of Dawn, you need to kill enemies to randomly collect souls that give you special abilities that generally relate to the vanquished monster. Without these skills in the second playthrough, you need to rely on the abilities that Julius, Yoko, and particularly the super-versatile Alucard have.
The place where this shines brightest is in the bosses, which don’t seem to have changed, but the lack of special souls to help you defeat them totally changes the strategies you need to use to do so. In particular, I find this with the last bosses in the game. Near the end of the game, as in nearly all Castlevanias, you face off against Death. This is the hardest Death battle in the series to my memory, and I’ve spent more than an hour of repeated attempts, each one lasting less than three minutes (and sometimes much, much shorter…) trying to take him down using various combinations of attacks.
Dawn of Sorrow’s second spin is a supremely satisfying experience for the hard-core Castlevania junkie, and is definitely worth giving your time to.
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