Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

The bizarre, segmented areas I've complained about before, stop being an issue in the last 30-40% of the game. Then you go to Dracula's castle, and Ecclesia becomes pretty much just like every other Metroidvania game. The story - not that it was anything special to begin with - vanishes outright, save for a short ending scene. The castle is very much back-to-basics Castlevania, with a clocktower and a dungeon and a library and so on.

It's much more engaging than the lame stages that precede it, but does nothing about what I perceive as the game's statistical problems. Namely: there are too many statistics. There are ten different damage types. There are glyphs out the yin-yang, not to mention the different possible combinations used for special attacks. Each enemy has its own weaknesses and strengths, and while some of them are obvious (fire demons are weak to ice, Death is weak to light), the fact that some aren't is a real stumbling block. This is an action game, not Pokémon. Thank Gunpei for GameFAQs, or I'd still be wasting my life trying to figure out how to deal damage to half of the castle's bosses.

I also feel like a bunch of things in this game do way too much damage. With the right weapons, offense is rarely an issue, but defense is paper-thin. Walking into enemies (especially bosses) tends to remove huge chunks of your life bar. There's one boss in the castle that you have to climb on, and there's no way to tell which parts of it you're allowed to touch except by dying on it a million times. What a dick.

The pinnacle of this game's frustration is, in a late stage of a boss fight, or deep in a level trying to find the next save point, being blind-sided by something that instantly takes half your health away. Put that together with the enemies that don't advertise their weaknesses, and it's clear that OoE is a stalwart of the old-school Die And Retry game design mantra. Come on, guys. It's 2009 - you can do better.

I'm somewhat non-plussed by the replay value, too. There are a couple of extra, semi-hidden stages to play through, but the monsters do shittons of damage and there's only one save point all the way at the end, so, fuck that. There are also a bunch of dumb NPCs who send you on quests, but most of them have you grind on some enemy forever for a rare item drop, only to give you a completely useless reward. And once you beat the game, there is of course an extra mode where you play as a character without glyphs or equipment, but I really have no interest in going through the same dull levels a second time.

This isn't to say the game doesn't have its fun points. The castle is, irritating bosses aside, generally as exciting as Castlevania ought to be. It's a shame that most of Ecclesia is instead filled with comparatively boring micro-stages. And the core gameplay is fun; just seriously hampered by irritating design decisions. I wouldn't really call this a bad game, but I don't think it lives up to the previous few 2D Castlevanias.

Progress: Beat Dracula