Playing A Game Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia NDS

It's a DS Metroidvania. Surprise!

The art style is supposedly different, replacing the last couple entries' "anime" aesthetic with a more western look, like the first two GBA titles - but really, who cares about this? And the weaponization system, Glyphs, is extremely similar to the Souls from Aria/Dawn of Sorrow (each kind of enemy can drop one, and you equip them to a face button). The world map, with play divided into discrete areas, is kind of new and gives the game a little sense of adventure, but is also an exacerbation of Portrait of Ruin's multitude of trivial sub-worlds.

What's getting me about Ecclesia is the difficulty. It started out super-easy, but within three or four levels, enemies were doing a ludicrous amount of damage to me. The second boss was a humongous pain in the ass, and probably took me a good 5-10 minutes to wear down (not counting deaths and retries). It seems like enemies are becoming stronger faster than I am... which is a bit concerning.

Progress: 14.6%