Review: Castlevania: Curse of Darkness
What is it?
Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is the most recent console adventure in the Castlevania franchise. It’s the second Castlevania game for PS2, and it’s also available for Xbox. Just as Simon’s Quest was a direct sequel to the original Castlevania for NES, Curse of Darkness is a direct sequel to Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. In Dracula’s Curse, Trevor Belmont teamed up with Sypha Belnades, Grant DaNasty, and Alucard to take down Dracula. Curse of Darkness adds some backstory to this event. Apparently Dracula had two go-to guys, Hector and Isaac. These Generals in Dracula’s army are Devil Forgemasters, which means they pal around with familiars that they can manufacture, then summon and dismiss at will.
The story goes that Hector betrayed Dracula in some way in response to objections about Dracula’s actions, indirectly causing his defeat at the hands of Trevor Belmont. Ashamed at his own betrayal, Hector gives up the trade until Isaac, who remained loyal to Dracula, kills Hector’s girlfriend Rosaly. A furious Hector chases Isaac to the ruins of the castle and the story of this game begins with the playing taking the role of Hector in his quest for vengeance.
How’s the story?
Curse of Darkness has one of the better storylines the series has seen. While the premise is pretty primitive and universal, the evolution of the narrative is very deliberate and in the end, very satisfying. The cutscenes are pretty short, but they’re beautiful, mostly are acceptably well voice acted and clearly motion captured, and they do a lot to advance the story. One cutscene in particular literally knocked me off my couch, as I had developed such a connection to one character that I reacted when they were mortally wounded.
The NPCs in the game are a mixed bag. Isaac is a flamboyant yet compelling villain and a challenging fighter who has clearly gone off the deep end. Isaac’s sister Julia is helping Hector in hopes that Isaac can be saved from whatever’s turned him into such a jackass. She also runs the only shop in the game. While you’re navigating the menus there, she says things that exactly contradict your menu selections, showing that despite an overall respectable job of localization, this is still badly done in parts. Periodically she shows up unexpectedly for one of the game’s cutscenes, during which she proves to be the weakest character in the game in addition to the most poorly acted. The two mysteries in the game are Zead and St Germain, and players won’t really know what’s going on with either of these two until the end of the game, though even then one of them will have you scratching your head. Trevor Belmont himself is also in the game, having returned to the castle to try to figure out just what’s going on, and he’s presented as the legendary badass you always imagined when he was just 16 pixels tall.
How does it play?
The game is built a lot like Lament of Innocence. The most apparent difference is the dynamic camera that makes it easier to explore the 3D environments. One of Lament‘s issues was how enemies had to be tuned not to appear from behind you unless the camera was far enough away that you could see them. Being able to adjust the camera at all times means the fights can be much more intense.
At first, I thought Castlevania: Curse of Darkness was a button masher. Over time I started to understand that it was a lot more complicated than that. There are different classes of weapons, such as sword, knuckle, and spear. Each class has a number of weapons within it that have different ranges, speeds, and attacks. Combos are pulled off by using a two-button attack system. For example, X will swing your weapon. XX will swing it twice in two different ways, and so forth. Ending a sequence with O will make for more elaborate combos with a finisher that changes based on how many presses of the X preceded it. Take a rapier, for example, and press X X X X O, and you will execute four quick swipes with the sword, followed by a flurry of forward strikes that does a large amount of damage at once. Three Xs or five will do something entirely different.
Weapons and armor in the game need to be forged using the various materials in the game. For example, if you find a piece of steel, you can forge that into a sword. If you forge that sword and then find a piece of, say, blue steel, you can combine them, making an even more powerful sword. Some of the materials are very, very rare and don’t seem to be dropped by enemies, meaning it can be challenging to decide what to combine them with. The game will tell you what you can combine the material with, but it won’t tell you what it will make until after you do it once. Throw some rare items together and get the ineffective-in-combat deck brush, and you’ll understand the frustration this can create… all these combinations are one-way.
However, even the ridiculous items like the deck brush and the electric guitar (I kid you not) have a use, and that’s in Devil Forging. Throughout the game, Hector will relearn how to forge various types of Innocent Devil, such as the Battle Type, which is basically a walking combat-driven hulk, the Mage Type that floats around zapping spells at things, the Bird Type that flies quickly around divebombing things and giving you a lift when needed, or the Fairy Type, which opens chests or heals you. Innocent Devils are evolved along a branching tree using Evo Crystals, which are dropped by defeated enemies and are color coded based on the type of weapon that you have equipped at the time. The branch the evolution takes depends on this color, and the skills your Devil will learn change depending on that evolution. Some of these branches will require you to kill some number of enemies using an item in the “special” category, such as a deck brush, which is something you’d be unlikely to do on purpose. Some of these skills are critical to progress in the game, so either a walkthrough or trial and error will be necessary to figure out what to do. Fortunately, Innocent Devils can be made again and again as they keep dropping seeds every few levels which can be taken to Julia and made into a new one. You can keep a certain number of Innocent Devils on hand, and Julia will hold the rest for you until you need them.
I really need to complain about the item system in the game, though. The recovery items that you can keep with you are pretty scarce, except for potions. At the most, the game doesn’t let you hold more than a small handful of potions and hi-potions, which means you’re forced to rely on other means to recover your life in the bigger battles, such as your Fairy Type. Complicating this issue is the fact that the AI on the Innocent Devils is terrible. You can be running around with four hit points left and your Fairy Type won’t realize you need healing until a minute later, assuming you’re still alive at that point. You can arrow around with the D-pad to command your Innocent Devil to do something specific like healing, but in these moments when you’re nearly dead, poking around a menu in real time to heal can be suicide.
How does it look and sound?
The enemies in this game are great. Iga’s team spent a lot of time and energy recreating many classic Castlevania foes in detailed 3D, and that attention to detail paid off. When you pop into a room and see a Slogra and a Gaibon there, and you know that’s exactly what they are, that’s a great moment. The fish men are not only beautiful to look at, they’re challenging to destroy as they tend to swarm you in great numbers. It’s really a great selection of monsters you’ll be slashing through. Learn to block early. A well-timed block can completely deflect an attack, which is not only a great feeling but can be the only way to survive, just as it was in Lament of Innocence.
The environments are staggeringly massive and varied, and even with a warp room in each of the many regions, you’ll spend a lot of time just running and running. You’ll always know where you are as each area has its own distinct look, like forest, mountains, caves, town, etc. The detail in the environmental designs is pretty high, though of course there are some muddy textures and lots of short loading screens, as you would expect from the RAM-shy PS2. The character designs for Hector and the NPCs in the game seem much more detailed than everything else in the game, which is great but occasionally seems a little off. In most cases it does a great job of helping you figure out what’s going on in the boss battles, because you can get slapped into a corner and barraged with attacks while the camera desperately tries to reorient.
The music in the game is great, as it usually is in Castlevania games. While overall I like Lament of Innocence‘s soundtrack better, some of it is absolutely spectacular, such as the music in Cordova Town. This contains a nicely remixed passage from Reincarnated Soul, the music from the first stage in Castlevania Bloodlines. Some of the songs break the immersion by sounding a bit less orchestral and more MIDI than the others. It seems the team is still generating the music electronically rather than with an orchestra, and they still don’t have the solo organ exactly right. When it’s playing by itself to create tension, it instead feels like you’re playing the game on an NES for a brief moment.
How’s the replay value?
Well, do you like chairs?
There are always lots of things in Castlevania games to collect. In this one, the hook is chairs. Scattered around the world there are different kinds of things you sit in. For example, in save rooms, Hector sits in a huge winged throne, which folds those feathered wings over him and saves the game. Once you’ve done this, one of those thrones appears in the “chair room,” a special private room in the game that holds your collection of… chairs. There’s a rocking chair in Julia’s shop. There’s a swing you can sit in hidden behind a wall in Cordova Town. Even the warp points have you sitting in a chair and then being blasted through the ceiling. Each chair has an explanation you can read while you’re sitting in it. I don’t know what you get for collecting all the chairs. Keep in mind this isn’t the only time Iga had us collecting furniture, as Juste Belmont had his own room to decorate in Harmony of Dissonance.
Beyond that, there are lots of hidden bits and bobs around. You can run around collecting all the materials so you can make every baseball bat and clown suit (which incidentally once belonged to “the famous Vampire Hunter Comesafter C”) in the game, but it’s not really that compelling the way collecting souls or glyphs was in the other games, as most of the items you’ll forge will be weaker than what you’ve got, and every time you find a rare item and forge it into something stupid, you’ll want to throw your controller.
As in most of these games, once you’ve completed it, a stronger difficulty level and the ability to play as Trevor Belmont are unlocked. He’s one of my favorites, so I’m going to have to try him out.
Is it worth it?
I think so. Hector is a compelling hero who’s far less whiny and annoying than, say, Alucard, who he is very reminiscent of both in backstory and motivations. It’s great to be able to see what happened in the aftermath of a classic game like Dracula’s Curse, particularly where Trevor Belmont is concerned. Some of the elements of this game were lifted whole into Castlevania Judgment, which really surprised me. There’s a major boss battle in here that’s pretty much exactly the same as one in Judgment. One of the NPCs in the game seems like he could be one of the new characters in Judgment as well, though they don’t look anything alike.
As a stellar evolution built on the solid base of Lament of Innocence and merged with the classic lore of Dracula’s Curse, Curse of Darkness gets four and a half out of five. Now why the heck isn’t Hector in Judgment?
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