Metroidvania Mania: Aria of Sorrow

(Game Boy Advance, 2003)

I beat this on December 20, with a play time of 4 hours and 37 minutes. I had played it before, but it was at least a few years ago.

The souls system, where regular enemies have a chance to drop their souls that you then equip and use like subweapons or support skills, I think works well as long as you're OK with just getting whatever you get and don't feel like you have to have some particular ones. A lot of them are kind of useless, but there are so many of them that that's not really a problem, and some of them are quite fun.

The equipment in the game feels a little simple, without very much variety in how it functions. Not being able to slash downward with swords makes it awkward to hit things sometimes. It didn't feel like there were many interesting decisions to make with equipment. There's an equipment and item shop, but I mainly found it useful for healing potions - which I think maybe should have been more limited in either their supply or use, because it's not very interesting to just quaff your way through boss fights (though I do also appreciate having that option).

Not having a minimap means I have to stop moving to open the map to see where I'm going all the time. Might have been hard to fit one on the GBA screen, though.

I didn't notice any big flaws in the map design, except that save rooms and teleport rooms are always fairly far apart - I actually like it when I'm exploring a new area and my resources get low and I have to turn back and carefully get back to a save point, but in this game I often felt like that journey was longer than it should have been and not very interesting. I did feel like I always had an idea of where I could go and get something done, which is good.

The story is pretty thin, but it's not really the point, and it also doesn't take up much time, so that's fine. The game doesn't take up much time on the whole, and I would say it's maybe a little short, but I suppose that's appropriate for a handheld title, and what's there is good. I don't think I realized my first time through that "Arikado" sounds suspiciously similar to a certain other name, and I think that's fun.

The game looks good and has good music, as usual for Castlevanias. The music would have been great on another console, but they did about as well as they could have with the GBA's capabilities.

There's a bad ending that you get by just beating the game, a good ending that I think the game gives you a reasonable amount of hints for, at least if you know that it exists, and apparently a sort of bonus ending with like one extra line in the ending cutscene if you do an unreasonable amount of grinding. I'm glad I don't feel compelled to do such things.

Beating the game lets you play through it again in Julius Mode, where you control Julius instead of Soma. I want to play through the Castlevanias with these alternate modes that they have, but in this case I didn't find it very interesting, because I don't think Julius feels that good to play and his gameplay never changes.

It's solid! I think I might try the randomizer for it at some point. Good game to watch speedruns of, too.

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