Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
This game has so many good ideas but I just didn't love the execution of it overall. The early levels are just too flat and linear and there's just not enough actual castle (although this could be mitigated by making it a castle by committee). I also wish there was a radial menu to be able to switch between more loadouts (obviously not doable on original hardware). The idea to have a weaknesses system is good, I just spent too much time switching in menus.
Levels are really horizontal here at the start and I don't care for that. The glyph system is interesting, soul adjacent for Soma.
Game looks really good though, I love the flair in Shanoa's animations.
Also fuck these weird floating tentacle monsters.
The progression curve on this feels weird. I don't feel like my weapons are strong enough currently.
I'm not a giant fan of how I have to do these little quests to then get the upgrade. I am not really feeling this one currently.
I really don't know how I feel about this one. It's different and it's trying things. I feel like it's hard to get into a good flow with the glyph weapons and I'm not sure I like this early on distributed structure of the locations. I guess I do like having a hub it's relatively easy to zip back to.
Okay, so the type matching and resistances thing is a cool idea but if you're going to do that I feel like I need more slots for glyph loadouts. I gotta switch between slashing and smashing and poking and then I want something that's a bit more ranged and then I want a magic one.
It's just very annoying and breaks flow to have to be like "fuck it's a skeleton let me switch my sword glyphs for hammers."
Rescued all the villagers baby. Still having a moderate amount of fun here. I think I'd say this slots in under Dawn of Sorrow but maybe only just?
We have made it to Dracula's castle. Every time I kill a boss and it doesn't have a cool new ability drop it makes me angry.
I'm really uncertain I'm going to finish this. I think I've seen enough to make a real judgment on it and it's "cool ideas kind of okay execution." What might get me to push through it is that I'm so very close to the end and Fortune's Weave is around the corner so am I going to start something NEW? Probably not. Although I'm so close to the end of this and DQV I'll probably have some left over time before Weave.
Beat it today. I did use a cheat to just help me over the hump. I just wanted to see it through.
I think this game is fine. The Castlevania series is much weaker for me overall compared to Metroid. I think the backtracking is possibly weaker because the verb gaining is much weaker. In this game for example, you get paries and wings so late and there aren't many other traversal powers beyond the double jump.
Also getting weapon upgrades is pretty underwhelming. Once you have all the variety it's mostly just getting the slightly more powerful versions. And for me at least, not much got better than rapiers. They deal so much damage so quickly.