Metroidvania Mania: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
2026-02-26
(Game Boy Advance, 2001)
Play time was 4 hours and 12 minutes, although that of course doesn't count time spent repeatedly dying to bosses, which there was a bit of. Underappreciated game overall, with a couple of significant weak points. I would not have played this game for very long without a patch that makes it so you always run when moving, without requiring you to double tap a direction. Without that, the game is just constantly a little bit annoying, and it adds up to a bad experience.
The second big flaw is a combination of the final boss and the random drops from enemies. In my playthrough, where I didn't avoid killing enemies very much even when revisiting rooms, I had 8 of the 20 DSS cards in the game drop, and the abilities they gave me actually did give me a decent amount of choices and variety for most of the game, but I did not end up with a card combination that gave me a decent way to hit the final boss in his final phase, and that ended up being quite long and miserable as a result. Better boss design would've been nice, but you could also smooth it over with more drops.
I like the idea of the equipment system, where you have just three armor pieces and those drop randomly from enemies, and instead of different weapons, you use the game's new "Dual Set-up System" to change the properties of the one whip you have. There are 10 Action cards and 10 Attribute cards, which very rarely drop from enemies, and you go to a menu and set one of both types to be active, and then you can press a button during gameplay to make your whip do fire damage or summon a familiar that attacks enemies or whatever. You have good enough baseline whip damage even if you get no card drops ever, and the drops theoretically just give you some more versatility for dealing with different situations. As noted above, though, that versatility can be pretty important, and the drops really are quite rare. It seems to me like the Castlevania metroidvanias could generally do with letting you buy more of the random drops, or having you find pieces of the souls/cards/whatever more frequently that you then assemble to get the full things, or having drops get increasingly likely with more kills, or something.
This game seems to have been a learning experience for Konami when it comes to map design for the GBA, in that it has a lot of big and tall rooms, with much more verticality than Aria of Sorrow. You're not as good at moving vertically as horizontally, and hitting things is harder when they're above or below you, and more vertical rooms tend to be more annoying with knockback. I do like how the big rooms feel to run around in, and the size doesn't usually cause too much trouble... except during the boss fights. The bosses are mostly in big rooms, and I often had them completely offscreen - which doesn't stop them from preparing their next attack. You could say that keeping track of them is part of the challenge, but it really just feels like you're fighting the small screen more than the boss. Smaller bosses in smaller rooms would've been better.
The boss fights are still generally good, and challenging (though perhaps less so if you have better card drop luck than I did). Some were easy, but a few of them required a bunch of tries while I figured out how to both avoid and do damage. (In the Dragon Zombies fight, it looks like their feet will hurt you if you touch them, but they don't!)
The overall world map and the flow of the game seems to have been done thoughtfully and well, since even without map labels or colored zones, I generally found myself having a good idea of where to go next. Exploration is consistently rewarding, as there are a lot of little corners of rooms and rooms hidden behind breakable walls, and they all contain permanent stat increase items, which are always nice to find. Save points are pretty frequent, and I often found one just as I was getting dangerously low on health. No notes on the minimap, as there is no minimap! You should put a minimap in your metroidvania!
The music in this game is great, and sounds good even on the GBA. I don't think it looks as good as Aria, but it does (I believe) have unique sprites for everything, and cool enemies that I don't remember seeing in other games, like the Electric Skeleton and the Fox Archer. The game has some alternate modes for multiple playthroughs, but they don't really fundamentally change the game at all. If I ever play this again, I might do it on Thief Mode, where you have worse offensive and defensive stats but much higher luck.
Finally, this game has a very funny glitch relevant to speedrunning, where you do some stuff at the start of the game and then you automatically do 9,999 damage to everything on the screen every frame or so - but watch out! If you get hit by an enemy spawning on top of you, you get unglitched and the run is over. Recommended viewing: Circle of the Moon Nuclear Completionist Speedrun
