Konami’s Koji Igarashi might not be too pleased with how his 3D Castlevania games have fared at retail, but I’ve genuinely enjoyed the ones I’ve tried. Personally, I think if Castlevania is going to succeed (fiscally) in 3D it probably will have to go first-person, perhaps with an over-the-shoulder view like Resident Evil 4. They’ve clearly gone for the third-person Devil May Cry feel with his most recent two efforts, Lament of Innocence on PS2, and Curse of Darkness for PS2 and Xbox.

Anyway, I want to talk about the weapon forging system in Curse of Darkness for PS2 which I’m currently playing in my PS3. Let me be clear that I don’t like weapon forging systems, generally speaking. In games where you can forge weapons, I don’t forge them. If it’s required, I don’t play the game. However, the way I pick up games in the Castlevania franchise can fairly be viewed, in a general sense, as blind. As a result, here I am forging weapons to progress in Curse of Darkness, and surprisingly enough, I like it.

Forging weapons in CoD works similarly to the way filling up your monster journal in just about every Castlevania since Symphony of the Night. You kill an enemy for the first time and its stats go into your journal. With this weapon system, the raw materials that are dropped constantly by slain enemies go into your inventory. When the raw materials are available, unnamed items appear in categories in your Combine submenu: categories such as sword, axe, spear, helmet. Open that submenu and you’ll see all the possible items you can make with the raw materials you’ve ever held. Forge one of them, and you’ll find out what it is, then it stays in that menu, available to be made whenever you wish. Sometimes you need a certain weapon as part of the recipe. For example, maybe you need a soft leather armor and one raw material of a certain kind to make hard leather armor. So you see how it begins to come together.

Further simplifying the process is that fact that, like the monster journal, your combine journal numbers every recipe. Want to collect them all? Watch the numbers. And you know, I’ll do it. Tying these recipes to what could be one of the most definitive aspects of Castlevania, which is just running around and killing everything in sight, is very smart. It’s the games that make me go fishing because I need some magical trout to combine with a photograph of a tree to use as a bow and arrow that piss me off. I’m looking at you, Dark Cloud 2.