Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Game Boy Advance

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the 17th 2D Castlevania platformer, Aria of Sorrow!

My gimmick this year is that I'm playing games you can find in a top ten list, and this one can be found in Nintendo Power's 20th anniversary Best of the Best list (in the 'GBA' section). It actually made top three, with the other two games being Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Metroid: Zero Mission. Hey I've played both of them already!

This was the last of three Castlevanias on the GBA, though the first to have a title beginning with 'A'. The series continued on the DS with a direct sequel called Dawn of Sorrow, which cleverly referenced both the 'D' and the 'S'. Sadly the adventures of Soma Cruz didn't get a second follow up on the 3DS, so we never got to see how they would've worked the number 3 into the title.

There'd been handheld Castlevania games for over a decade by this point, ever since Castlevania: The Adventure came out for the Game Boy in 1989, but whenever people talk about the classic 80s and 90s Castlevania titles they're generally talking about the console games. Something weird happened in 1999 though. Veteran game series were making the switch to polygons, with sequels like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid presenting a good argument for 2D being hopelessly archaic, and Castlevania was no exception. The thing is, Castlevania 64 was bloody terrible (I've been told), especially compared to Symphony of the Night from two years earlier. So when the 2D GBA games started mimicking Symphony's style and carrying on the 'music term of X' naming tradition started by Rondo of Blood, they were ones that came across like the true successors to the Castlevania franchise instead of the 3D games.

Anyway I'm going to play the first hour or so and write too many words about what happened. Plus there'll be screenshots! So many screenshots.

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The game begins with a man in a white coat climbing steps as a wall of text scrolls up to fill the screen. Symphony of the Night gave me a screenful of text as well, so I suppose it's an Igavania thing (Castlevanias that Koji Igarashi worked on).

There's two things that all Castlevania games to this point had in common and that's that they're set in the past and they take place in Europe (usually in the general area of Count Dracula's castle). They also typically star a relative of Simon Belmont who's been training their whole life to be a muscle-bound badass.

This time though I'm playing as a Soma Cruz, an exchange student studying in Japan in the distant future of 2035! I don't think he's got anything to do with the Belmont family and I'm fairly sure he isn't studying to be the ultimate vampire slayer. He's just some guy with a nice white coat.

Message boxes that cover up the characters huh? That's different.

Anyway Soma went to visit an ancient shrine with his friend Mina Hakuba (no relation to Mina Harker from the novel Dracula). Unfortunately he decided to go during a weird solar eclipse and I guess it made him pass out for some reason because he wakes to find a guy called Genya Arikado mocking him for it.

Arikado's about to explain what's going on, when suddenly his keen senses alert them to the presence of... an enemy.

Phew, that was close. I think we'll be okay now as long as they don't pan the camera away like that again.

Here's how Soma compares to previous Castlevania protagonists if you're curious. He's tiny compared to the 16 bit sprites and Symphony protagonist Alucard, but a giant compared to the old handheld heroes on the top right. Wait a minute, Arikado... Alucard... nah, it must be coincidence!

Soma's somewhere between the Circle of the Moon and the Harmony of Dissonance characters in scale, which surprises me as I figured that the GBA heroes would all be the same height. They're all a different style too, which is good because the Circle hero is barely visible on an unlit GBA screen and the Harmony sprite looks bloody terrible with that blue glow (he's even worse when he's moving). I think they've got it right this time.

I guess these monsters aren't as tough as they look if an exchange student can kill one in one swipe of a knife. Wait, why is Soma carrying a knife?

Anyway Soma absorbs the soul of the monster and gets a new power! The power to throw spears. I'm pretty sure I have that power in real life too, but I guess it's finding the spears to begin with that's the hard part.

CASTLE CORRIDOR

Mina's safe now for the time being, but Dracula's castle is currently inside the solar eclipse and they're stuck inside the castle. Seem that the only way they're getting out of here is for Soma to fight his way through to the Master's chamber.

The game's a lot like Symphony of the Night so far, with the hero using a blade instead of the traditional whip, and I've got multiple paths to explore. Like I could jump up those platforms for instance and see what's up there.

Oh never mind, I can't jump high enough yet. I suppose I'm stuck going right for the time being.

The stats screen returns from Symphony as well, and I've got all kinds of numbers that need to go up. Plus I've got souls to set, equipment to equip, items to use, and abilities to activate. Or at least I will do, after I've made a bit more progress.

Also I've explored 0.4% of the castle already!

Hey a sword, just lying out in the open! That'll be a nice upgrade to this knife. I can't wait to see bigger numbers come out of the enemies when I hit them.

Hang on, I recognise this room... kind of. One thing I like about the Castlevania sequels is how areas of Dracula's castle can echo previous games. It's a new layout, but sometimes there's something I'll find familiar, like how the entrance corridor has brought me to stairs leading down to a waterlogged section infested with Mermen.

This bit's in the first Castlevania on the NES, Bloodlines on the Mega Drive/Genesis, even Symphony of the Night. Though Aria of Sorrow's missing the hidden wall chicken!

Aria does still have the traditional candles on the walls, and they still inexplicably drop hearts when you smash them, but they've taken away the candle counter on my HUD. The previous few Castlevanias feature a mana bar for your skills, while the hearts power your sub weapons, but Aria has switched to running everything off the recharging mana, with the hearts I collect helping to fill it up.

Okay there's three exits to this area, so I guess I'll try the bottom left one first.

Oh damn, it's one of those transition rooms from Symphony used to give the game a moment to load data from the disc between areas. In fact Symphony's loading rooms even had 'CD' etched into the ceiling, while this one just kind of hints at it. A GBA game doesn't need time to load, but I guess they felt that it was nice to give the player a break occasionally.

Speaking of CDs, the sound quality has taken a real hit since the move to cartridge, even more than you'd expect going from 700MB to maybe 8MB. Judging by its games the GBA seems like it's roughly as powerful as a SNES, Mega Drive and Amiga, but it doesn't really have a sound chip it can rely on to handle the audio, so the CPU has to do the work itself, along with everything else it's doing. It does have a chip to crush all the music down to 8-bit though, so it always sounds muffled and fuzzy. It's a real shame because the actual soundtrack is still excellent.

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

Aria of Sorrow

Now that I've got an empty screen to run across I can tell that Soma's walk animation is a huge step up over the last two games, and the last one in particular. I mean seriously, how are these from the same developer and the same system less than one year apart?

Though I can't help but notice that Soma's walk isn't quite in sync with the speed the screen's scrolling. He's walking in slow motion and gliding forward.

UNDERGROUND RESERVOIR

Hey Soma doesn't instantly die if he touches water! I suppose that confirms that he's not a Belmont.

Unfortunately this route turned out to be a waste of time in the end, as I don't have the abilities to get any further. I'm going to need to be able to jump higher or swim deeper before I come back this way. The castle may not be entirely linear, but there are plenty of dead ends.

Still, I didn't lose much health and I managed to fill in a bit more of the map, so it wasn't a total disaster. Plus I found a tasty meat!

CASTLE CORRIDOR (again)

I've found a backdash skill! Now I can slide backwards by pressing a shoulder button, which is a fantastic move that I'm going to forget I have almost immediately.

Okay, I'm back in that big room with three exits again and I've already tried the bottom left one, so let's try bottom right this time.

A save room! These are my favourite rooms, as they let me save my progress so far and give me all my health back. It's easy to get mana in this game but health is a much more precious resource. I can find some potions around, but I won't get it back from candles, it doesn't regenerate, and the game won't even let me have an Estus flask!

Hey I just noticed that the coffin that Alucard used to use to save in is lying in the rubble. That's a nice touch.

I left the save room and took the third exit this time, which put me back on track. Though it wasn't long before the path branched again, giving me a choice between going up or entering a scary glowing door (I went up).

Turns out that the Axe Armor enemies are back again, and they still throw axes across the screen that I have to jump over or duck under. In fact the game's brought a lot of the classic enemies back, because that's what Castlevania games do.

I've noticed that it's been a bit kinder than the previous two GBA games though, as I remember they put some really annoying enemies around the starting area. If the worst I have to face here is an Axe Armor I can live with that.

Oh I got a level up! All my numbers went up, it's great! I didn't get to pick any new skills or choose what attributes to raise, but I can't complain. Seems like this route is another dead end though, I'll have to head through the scary glowing door on the right after all.

Oh right, glowing doors lead to boss rooms. And they seal behind you to make sure you can't run off mid-way through to save and get your health back.

This guy's a total pushover though! His fire breath and his bone club attacks are telegraphed (as they should be) and it's pretty easy to just dodge them all. I mean I didn't dodge them all, because I'm bad at games, but someone better than me could. I did kick his ass in 30 seconds though, and got a full heal as a reward.

I found a 'Castle Map 1' item in the next room so I can see what I'll be facing in the next stretch... eventually. I also got a Flying Armor soul that lets me glide for a bit so I'm going to leave all those unexplored rooms for now and head back to the Underground Reservoir instead. I want to see if this new power helps me get past any of the dead ends I ran into last time.

Nope, no luck with the dead ends. Though I did accidentally smash through this wall with my Winged Skeleton sub weapon while trying to kill a flying eyeball. There was a secret room behind it with a Mind Up potion! It's not an upgrade, just a mana potion, but it's still good to have.

The Flying Armor got me across this gap at least. I just held the R button and glided over on the wings of... whatever that's supposed to be. A samurai helmet? It doesn't actually let me fly though and it uses up mana so I can't just keep the button held down all the time.

The trouble I have with taking screenshots of platformers is that I end up with lots of pictures with just one enemy on them. Makes it look like the game's practically empty, when they're actually all over the place. So I decided to throw in a few GIFs as well to show what the game's really like... and I'm still only getting one enemy on screen.

I got another level up though. Plus a new soul for my collection. It's not a sub weapon this time though, it's a stat upgrade.

Hey I've ran into another human being, or at least he claims to be. Man, everyone in this game's so well dressed.

Soma and Graham have a bit of a conversation here, but there's no dialogue options for me so all I can do is sit and watch. Well, sit and press the button to skip to the next line. Graham seems to know a lot about what's going on... explaining that Dracula died in 1999 and a new master will claim all of his powers, but what Soma really wants to know is whether this is really Dracula's castle. He seems really fixated on the fact that Dracula's castle should be in Europe and not next to a shrine in Japan.

CHAPEL

Anyway I went exploring again and it seems like I've found another place I shouldn't be able to get to yet.

I keep trying to leap off this bell and make it onto the ledge, but every time Soma goes splat on the ground again. I guess I should just be grateful there's no falling damage in this and move on, but I still feel like there's a way I can make it up there with just the abilities I have. Like maybe I could use the backdash at the edge of the bell and then... no, that's a stupid idea.

Oh crap, backdashing actually worked! I've reached a forbidden part of the castle, filled with forbidden treasures that I shouldn't be able to collect yet.

Oh. Turns out that I can't have the treasures, because I don't have the upgrades I need to reach them yet. The game's outwitted me again. Back to the regular path then.

Hey I've reached the far side of the castle! That was quicker than I expected. I've got a choice to make now though: up or down, and I'm going... down.

Down led to a save room! There's also another boss door down here, but I'm going to hang around for a while outside and let my mana charge up first. No sense in going into a boss fight at less than full strength if I can help it.

It seems that most types of enemies have a chance of dropping a soul for me and I'm getting a decent collection of skills now. Some are sub weapons, some give me movement abilities like the Flying Armor that lets me glide, and some are just stat boosts.

The trouble is I can only have one of each type equipped at once and if I want to switch them I need to go to the menu again. It makes switching weapons much slower than you'd want. Still, at least the game's letting me switch weapons at all, which is a step up from a lot of the older games.

Alright, I'm going to go take the second boss down. If he's as easy as the giant blue skeleton I don't see this taking long.

Crap, he fires a second fireball to catch me just as I'm landing from jumping over the first one! Plus his tail is poisonous so if I'm hit with it I get to regret it for a while. Manticores are assholes.

I started this battle with what seemed like a ton of health, 368 HP, but that's not so much when he's taking off 60 with every hit. I need to get somewhere safe and pelt him with my sub weapons. The trick will be figuring out the right one for the job.

Hey this is working, kind of! He hasn't given me much space to work with though... or many hit points either. I'm down to 2 HP here, which is 59 too few to survive another hit, so I need to be a lot more careful now.

Oh shit he's shifted forward a couple of inches! I need to find somewhere else to be!

I just want to make this clear: I have absolutely no complaints about the collision detection in this game. My reflexes could be a little better though.

Anyway, I jumped down and threw a spear into the manticore's face to win the battle, then collected my full health reward. My next goal is to get back to that last save point because that fight was way too close and I don't want to have to do it again.

Uh, I don't seem to be able to reach the platform leading back up to the save room. I suppose I'm going to have to keep moving forward until I reach the next one.

Oh by the way, I should mention that enemies respawn when you return to a room, so this means I'm about to fight my way through the corridor leading to the boss room for the third time now. They're kind of a pushover though, so I couldn't really describe this as being 'the Dark Souls of games where you explore a labyrinthine fortress full of save points and shortcuts, slicing up infinite undead along the way and stealing their souls'.

STUDY

Okay, that's a big flaming skull.

I can't stay and fight though, I need to get myself to a save room quick! I've only got 164 HP left now and I don't want to give the Manticore a rematch. Fortunately I can just run right past most enemies, and the rest of them I can jump over.

Crap! Who thought it'd be funny to put a bone pillar wall in my way when I'm down to 120 HP and I'm racing to find a save point? Now I need to stop and kill these things before I can move on.

Also look at that horrible pillow shading on that column on the left. What's up with that? Plus the light source for the vase and the picture frames in the background are in opposite directions. Oh no I must be in the pixel art nitpicking zone.

I still haven't found my save room, but I have found a crate. Soma's sprite doesn't have any pushing frames with his arms out, but that's fine as he can still shove objects around with his chin. My plan is to shove this crate down the hole, then push it across to use it as a step.

Damn, even with the crate as a step I still can't jump high enough to reach this shelf. The game's doing a fantastic job of really making me want this jumping upgrade.

Trouble is when I finally find the thing I won't remember all the places I couldn't reach before. I wish I could just write notes onto the map like in Ultima Underworld. Though at a GBA resolution those would be some pretty chunky notes.

A spider woman who spits bullets from her mouth like it's a Gatling gun? C'mon game give me a break already! At least I've finally got a screenshot with more than two enemies on screen at once for you.

Anyway I did manage to save in the end, thankfully. I suppose this would be a good time for me to turn the game off... but I still haven't got my jump upgrade, so I'm going to stick with it for a little while longer.

I found a giant face blocking a hallway and it only opened up when I faced away from it. So I backdashed through it and now I'm fighting a student witch. These are one of my favourite enemies, because they fire cats at you, and if that doesn't work they try to smack you with their broom. Also if you kill them, they just turn into a cat themselves and escape. They're all about the cats.

At the end of the path I collected my treasure: a whip sword.

It's like Ivy's sword in Soulcalibur I guess. Also it'll improve my ATT by 35%, so I think I'll be equipping it right now.

I've only got three equipment slots, one for a weapon, one for armour and another for an accessory, so it's greatly simplified compared to Symphony of the Night. The other two GBA games don't give you many slots either. And none of the games really change the sprite at all no matter what you're wearing, unless you count Alucard's cape changing colour in Symphony. Or those boots that make him 1 pixel taller.

Alright I'm up to boss #3 and the whip sword is really working out for me. I can only hit him above or below the shield though, and it's taking forever.

Also I'm losing more health than I'd like, so I need to switch up my strategy.

Well this isn't working much better.

The fight does give me an excuse to show off my Skeleton Archer power though. Finally, I've found a use for a bow that takes a while to materialise before it fires!

Okay I'm getting bored of this now, I've been doing this for over a minute now and that feels like half an hour when you're in the middle a boss fight. Still, I must be close to beating him by this point. Surely.

ANOTHER MINUTE OF FIGHTING LATER

Oh cool, the boss room led to a dead end. Fortunately it's a dead end containing a new character and an upgrade.

Hammer was ordered to investigate a shrine, but when he found himself in Dracula's castle he just bailed on his mission and now he's decided he wants to set up a shop at the castle entrance. Seriously, that's exactly what he says. The dialogue in this game is from another dimension sometimes.

Anyway I went over and picked up my new ability and it turned out to be double jump! That's the exact upgrade I wanted! I can finally go back to all those places with stuff too high for me to reach! Though I've started coming across tiny gaps I need to slide to get under, so my lack of a slide skill is going to torment me now instead.

I pushed that crate down the gap and used it as a step again, this time I could jump high enough to reach the treasure: a new weapon! But now I need to decide if I actually want to use it. It's got an overhead arc which is bloody handy against enemies that swoop down at me, but it has much less range than my whip sword. Also it seems a little slower maybe... or maybe not. Even when I can see the weapons side by side it's hard to tell.

Okay this is new. What does this room door?

Oh it's a teleporter! I can teleport between any two portals I've visited, though the game's being nice and giving me the one above the castle entrance for free. I'm at the yellow square on the right at the moment, and the white circle is my selected destination, so that's a lot of backtracking I'd be skipping if I used it.

Hey this means I can drop by Hammer's new shop and see what he has available.

I like how Hammer's shop changes the interface slightly to suit his 'mid 90s military action game' theme.

Turns out that Hammer's way better at finding items than I am and his shop seems to have everything. Fortunately candles drop money when your mana's full so I have a bit of cash to spend here.

I could grab a new weapon like a spear or a katana, or maybe some armour... though those potions would be a huge help in boss battles. I'd have to really stock up on the things for them to be any good however, as they only heal 100 HP and I've got 400 at the moment.

(I decided to just grab the CASTLE MAP 2 in the end).

I decided to go look through my own menu while I was hanging out at the entrance, and found that there's a bestiary here. So now I finally know what a bone pillar's made of. It's a dinosaur fossil! Some bloody wizard rigged a 90 million year old dinosaur head to spit fire, just because that's the kind of thing wizards find funny.

Right, I really need to wrap this up already. I'm really tempted to track down that slide skill and go sliding under things, but if this article drags on any longer I'll have to start a part 2.


CONCLUSION

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The classic 8-bit and 16-bit Castlevania games are all about being hard, but fair. They really punish you for making a mistake and force you to practice sections over and over again, but you've got infinite continues so you get to keep most of your progress. They're not about upgrades, new equipment or levelling up, they're about getting more skilled as a player.

Aria of Sorrow, on the other hand, is about being a tank and just ploughing through anything in your way on a mission to explore every corner of the castle and collect all the treasures. Then when you get a new ability, you backtrack through all the old familiar foes and find that you're even more unstoppable now. So far getting hit by regular enemies has hurt my pride more than it's hurt my character, though that was reason enough for me to try to be less crap at it. Maybe it's better to say it's not punishing, however you will eventually start feeling your mistakes as they chip away at your finite health bar on your long journey to the next save room refill. Boss fights are different though, as they could go either way. A few of the bosses I fought were absolutely piss-easy, while others gave me some real trouble. That Manticore knocked me down to 2 HP before I even knew what happened! Plus I had to drink four potions to survive the Headhunter boss I ran into after totally failing to turn the game off when I said I did (I needed that slide ability, man.) I always felt like it was my fault though when I did badly against bosses and there's always a save room close by if you die mid-fight. Not that I ever needed it.

I'm fairly average at platformers and I'm terrible at boss battles, so the fact that I never managed to get Soma killed at all, ever, should tell you a lot about the challenge level in the first few hours. I'm not sure if this is easier than Symphony of the Night, but it felt easier. I didn't really miss the challenge to be honest, as the game's so slick and well animated that it's a joy to get around and explore the castle. The story isn't all that great, but the dialogue makes up for it by being amazing. It's right on the line where I can't tell if it's deliberately bad or if it's ironic, but any resemblance to how real people act is purely coincidental. I just wish the platforming was as interesting, because the level design is generally as dull as it is in Symphony. There's lots of walking down flat hallways dodging enemy attacks.

In fact most things are actually a downgrade from Symphony; the graphics are less spectacular, the music quality is noticeably worse, and it even feels less imaginative. But it's running on a much less powerful system so you'd expect as much. As a GBA game it's bloody impressive and it's definitely my favourite of the three Castlevania games on the system. There just hasn't been anything to annoy me so far! I've got no irritations to complain about, except maybe having to enter the menu to switch sub weapons.

I don't know why I didn't give Symphony my prestigious 'Wins the Prize' award back in the day, you'd have to go back in time four years and ask my previous self, but I've decided to hand one out to Aria of Sorrow. Maybe the two games can share it.

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I hope some of those words actually made sense. I don't know whether it's the heat, or the fact I got less than 5 hours sleep last night, but I'm basically sleep-typing right now.

Thanks for reading by the way! I know I say that all the time, but it's not like I've gotten any less thankful. Anyway, you should leave a comment, maybe even take a guess at what the next game will be. I've tried to make the clue a bit easier this time.