What is the best castlevania entry for the GBA? in what order i should play them?
>Portrait of ruin
>Circle of the moon
>Aria of sorrow
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GBA castlevania
What is the best castlevania entry for the GBA? in what order i should play them?
>Portrait of ruin
>Circle of the moon
>Aria of sorrow
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I don't think order really matters much with them, but if you're stressed just do release order.
Aria of Sorrow is the best by far.
You should play them in release order if you plan to play them all. I don't know what benefit would come from playing in a different order.
i'm not sure i agree with that. Aria is probably the best, but the art direction is e-girl and the mechanics feel very vanilla and shallow. I really enjoyed CotM myself, i like the mechanic, the enemies were interesting, and the later rush challenges are pretty insane.
>the art direction is e-girl
???
Are you confusing it with Dawn of Sorrow?
>art direction is e-girl
Sir, what does that mean?
>art direction is e-girl
pretty sure it's a grown woman
>the art direction is e-girl
What did he mean by this?
Some idiots are trying to make "e-girl" mean "effeminate". A lot of older Castlevania fans never liked that everyone started getting a bishonen aesthetic instead of being not!Conan the Barbarian like Simon was.
Which is weird, because probably the e-girlest CV games are Rondo of Blood and the N64 ones, which are not part of the artstyle the anon is decrying
>Portrait of ruin
That's a DS game Anon but I love it
Frick,i meant harmony of dissodance,i messed up
If you want to play them all play them in release order so you can appreciate it advancing.
*Harmony: I think it's a bad game. Tons of backtracking and basically no difficulty passed the start.
*CotM: A love it or hate it game. It's the hardest one and has the least ways to cheese. It's the darkest art direction which some people find dull. I think it's the best
*Aria 1/2: Great visuals and a great toybox of spells, tons and tons. A grinder's favorite game as each enemy drops a unique spell. These are pretty much universally considered good.
*PoR: There's a case to be made that this is the best. It's toybox is as big Aria, probably larger. In terms of how many areas there are to go through, bonus modes, and abilities your characters have this is clearly the best game. The second least annoying backtracking. But nothing is particularly refined and a lot of what you have is gimmicks or just obseleted by something else
*OoE: Many people say this is the best. It's the least maze-like and thus has the least backtracking. It's very well refined and sometimes approaches the quality of level design the classic vanias have.
A fun thing about PoR is all the physical subweapons that gain new forms when you max our their skill rating. Being able to swap characters and playstyles on a whim also keeps things fresh. Also it's literally Jojo reference: the game.
OoE is frustrating because the character and overall style are so beautiful, Shanoa is fun to play, AND I truly love the idea of resurrecting the whole "exploring the countryside" outside the castle thing from CV2/3, but playing it just feels like biting into a delicious-looking sirloin and finding out it's medium on the side of well. Not necessarily BAD, but not the amazing life-altering experience you were expecting. The actual room-by-room design just feels kind of flat and uninspired.
Remember in SOTN where you finally get the double jump, and you just happen to use it in a seemingly-innocuous looking location in the underground waterway, triggering the spawn of a boring old barrel-skeleton from Dracula X, whom if you lure a few screens over to the right his barrel can just happen to coincidentally break through a wooden platform to let you acquire an HP up, then if you fall through the hole at the bottom of this tiny innocent-seeming secret area, you end up finding a whole new region and entering a gigantic golden Ridley head into the fricking UNDERWORLD? Yeah. In OoE it's more, "hold right to get to the next area".
I think Ecclesia was focusing more heavily on tight design than exploration. It's one of the smallest CVs but it was also one of the best balanced since animation canceling was a core part of Shanoa's gameplay.
>tight design
Ah that's why they added all those npc fetch quests.
prostitute
did you really need to make a thread for this?
Release order is fine.
Good excuse to talk about these games.
I don't think that's necessary for Aria, besides, it's not like you need to grind up 100% to play the game or get the best endings.
For Dawn, the Luck stat is actually busted, so it makes it really obnoxious to get some stuff later in the game, there's a patch which adjusts it so it's closer to Aria's, which I think is enough and makes the game more playable.
There's also patch which excises the stylus gimmicks, which I'd have really loved back when the game was new. It makes the game flow a LOT better.
Aria is pretty easy on Normal. A while back I tried doing a fresh save on Hard, and it makes the game a lot more fun. I wonder if there's a patch somewhere which unlocks Hard Mode for you?
Anyway, this also applies for Dawn, it's more fun starting fresh on Hard.
Aria>Harmony>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>CotM
I would play Harmony first as it's a much shorter and easier game, then Aria, then skip Circle because it's really not worth playing unless you enjoy grinding the same enemy for a 0.001% drop over and over again for 200 hours while having to double tap left or right the entire time
>grinding the same enemy for a 0.001% drop over and over again for 200 hours
>grinding the same enemy for a 0.001% drop over and over again for 200 hours
You don't have to do that.
You can just play the game.
You have permission to be a grownup and make your own choices.
Aria by far. It's awesome. Circle looks nice, but it's busted and you'll probably resort to cheating like everyone does in that game. Portrait isn't a GBA game. It's DS.
Post it. Post it, you cowards.
I don't know why but Castlevania games just don't have the same satisfying sense of progression as Metroid and the RPG mechanics feel tacked on
That's because they sukkk dick
idk man, might be a skill issue.
>ignoring game breaking flaws is a skill
Delusional
He's an ultrahot, Boomer-certified protip, straight from me to you: If you're over the age of 30, you're allowed to activate a cheat in Castlevania games to give yourself 999 luck so you don't have to grind shit out your entire life. I had enough of that in my teens, I paid me dues, we grownups got places to go and people to do, no sense wasting the same chunk of your life again for the worst part of the game.
Enjoy! If anyone gets you trouble over it, tell them to take it up with me *cracks knuckles, sips monster energy after glancing at clock to make sure it's not past 6pm*
While I agree, I accidentally beat Aria of Sorrow in, like, a single afternoon when the GBA collection came out on the Switch. Either I got lucky with my drop rate, or its way easier than I remember.
I got the double pack cart with Harmony and Aria for Christmas and I finished both games by the 27th. They aren't particularly long or hard games.
>you're allowed to activate a cheat in Castlevania games to give yourself 999 luck so you don't have to grind shit out your entire life.
there are patches for both games to fix the luck which apparently is fricked on both games. along with no touchscreen for DoS
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3855/
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3407/
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3408/
I'll always be partial to Circle of the Moon because it was my first Castlevania game. Honestly, if they fixed the god-awful drop-rate for the cards, I'd want a whole side-series of the Graves family taking on other famous vampires. Less high-gothic horror, and more dreary, pulpy, London Fog horror.
Harmony of Dissonance is the easiest one; normally that's a letdown, but for a new player it's a great start. After that I'd go back and try Circle of the Moon. Aria of Sorrow has a direct sequel on the DS, so playing it last is a great way to cap off the GBA trilogy.
If you're interested, there's a patch for CotM that places cards in the levels as upgrades. There's another patch that gives you the dashing speed by default.
CotM is rough
Skip if it gets too rough
HoD is okay but the exploration can be tiring, especially if you're going for 100%
Haven't played AoS yet but everyone's saying it's the best one
PoR is DS, also haven't played it yet
I actually enjoy the feeling of desolation and being insignificant in the massive corridors of COTM, it's kind of neat. The different whips are neat but techwise it is heavily outshined by later entries.
Vampire Kiss: Dracula XX
Play in release order, CotM then HoD then AoS.
You can enjoy all of these vanilla but there do exist fan mods to fix issues with them.
CotM has "card mode" which changes DSS cards from being random drops to exploration rewards. It's a huge improvement over vanilla.
There's also patches to change movement so you don't need to double tap to run, as a lot of people don't get on with that.
HoD has various color palette patches and overhaul mods like "Revenge of the Findesiecle"
AoS has bug fixes for stats, as the luck stats barely have any influence on drop rates (accessories DO however), and the int stat only affects the damage output of guardian souls (R button abilities), not bullet souls (sub-weapon style attacks).
You arguably don't need these fixes as the vanilla game plays fine without them, but there's an argument to be made that bullet souls go under-used in the vanilla game due to not growing stronger and MP generation being too slow.
For GBA i give the first place to aria of sorrow.
For nintendo DS i give the first place to portrait of ruin.
AoS and it’s not even close then all three DS titles are better than the remaining 2 GBA games. But CotM is still fun. HoD is not out right bad but just mediocre compared to the rest.
Circle of the Moon should always be your second choice, it's mid. Harmony of Dissonance sucks and is pretty short, if you're committed to doing all 3 maybe do that one first so you feel the improvements. Aria of Sorrow is the best, long and with an addictive if optional grind, you'll probably get burned out and spoiled playing that one first.
Circle of the Moon would be the best if it wasn't for the garbage movement which should have been fixed in the collection but for some reason wasn't. Aria of Sorrow is the most cohesive of the three but it's pretty easy overall and it's very easy to trivialize. Portrait of Ruin is very forgettable.
This. How fixing hard would it have been for them to make running the default speed or at least include a run button and increase the drop rates beyond Korean mmo tier. Everything about the games design shouts
>limited content so let's make it tedious to do or acquire anything in order to extend play time lmao
Poor man's Metroid
they are to metroid what bubsy is to sonic, and there was a zoomer attempt to revision bubsy as "akshully the best", but it got nipped
bubsy is better than Sonic? I might have to finally try the games out, I've been meaning to since the creator died
More like Good Metroid Fusion
>GBAvanias are as bad as Bubsy
Deluded and unmedicated.
Circle of the Moon is an awesome game
Aria of Sorrow has my favorite (bad) ending in the entire franchise
Order of release works out.
Do you guys use any form of colour correction? I switch between the mGBA default and the Retroarch shader for NSO's occasionally.
Gonna ask here to not make a new thread.
Playing the NES Castlevania on the Collection on the Switch. I understand the sprite flickering bullshit and that it's supposed to be emulating the NES game accurately.
What I don't remember Simon's entire sprite completely disappearing for like 2-3 seconds after being hit.
Is that how it always was? The whole sprite disappearing completely for a couple seconds?
That's your screen's refresh rate at work. Completely skips some sprites when its suppose to be flickering.
I noticed the same thing on the SNES Aladdin game, I'll have to look into the specs of my monitor I guess.
You can lock your monitor's framerate when running certain programs
CotM is really fun for the first half and then turns to shit halfway through. Last time I played it I got up to the Chapel before punking out because I knew if I beat the bondage goat the only reward was the fricking Twin Dragons.
HoD is a flawed game, but not a bad one. Zipping around with forward and back dashes is fun. Screwing with magic+subweapons is fun. There are a lot of neat background details that were impossible to pick out on a normal GBA you can see with emulation, which I like. But the castle layout is a fricking mess and the bosses are way too easy.
AoS is my top favourite CV of all time.
...but if you want to play them all then the only choice is release order.
Aria of Sorrow is by far the best, at it is pretty much the best Castlevania game.
Dissonance is #2
Circle of the Moon is a distant last, in fact I would just skip it.
To those of you complaining about drop rates, you know you don't need to get every single item right? I remember beating CotM as a kid shortly after it came out, and I was missing a bunch of the cards at the end.
OP, all 3 games are good. Play them in release order if you're going to play all 3. If you're only going to play one, play AoS.
>you don't need
You don't NEED to play the game at all. It's not about what you need or don't need, it's about what the game incentivizes you to do. If the game has a really fun ability or spell hidden behind RNG, you either grind for it or you randomly have less fun on each playthrough. This applies to CotM and AoS, but because CotM's drop rates are so much worse, you're liable to miss out on way more. That's why people bring them up.
Circle of the Moon is clearly the best.
Most people will say it's Aria but that game is the moment the series became dogshit normievania with the weeb plotline and bullshit stupid souls system.
i bought the advance collection, playing through circle of the moon atm. it's decent
>CotM
Cards are fun. It's the roughest around the edges but not a bad game. Graphics are nice but they never came back to that style. Whipping is fun too and exploration is rewarding. Also great music.
>HoD
Graphics take a deep plunge into the shitter, it's the worst looking and sounding game. Maybe it was a sacrifice for being a bigger game than CotM. Whipping is also nice and Juste is cool but not worth 100%. Also has the most disappointing final boss of the games. It's not the end of the world if you skip this but it's not a bad game.
>AoS
The better of the 6 games (I'm counting the NDS games). Graphics are great, music is perfect, exploration is fun and rewarding and you get skills progressively. Soul farming can even be fun provided you get the ring that helps with it. Easily the most replayable of the bunch for some reason.
(1/2)
>DoS
It was THIS CLOSE to be as perfect as AoS but item crafting is unnecesary and a pain. The extra mode where you play as three characters is based. Soul crafting aside, it's as good and fun as AoS.
>PoR
My personal favorite of the bunch but most will tell you it's not the best. Has some haters for some reason.
Kind of a return to stage-based games with the paintings with each being its own contained world. Great music, John and Charlotte are fun, magic is interesting and the weapons are cool too. Has a bunch of different unlockable modes with different characters, all of them fun, even the Axe armor. Also a lot of typos and bugs (you gotta look for them to get them tho so don't worry)
>OoE
Arguably the best of the NDS trio. Shanoa is hot, glyphs are really fun to mess around with. Music is better, it's even more stage based but as a result the main castle is smaller. Makes for a more condensed game and adventure tho.
Just one unlockable mode with a new character which feels as a step down from the last game and it's not that fun even.
Don't bother tracking these games, they're hella expensive now, just emulate or pirate them on a hacked 3DS.
Overall all six are great games and worth a play.
(2/2)
I feel that PoR just needed another six months or so in the oven to be the perfect game. It's not bad, but it's kind of underbaked.
God I wish someone would riff on the dual character mechanic. I thought Gal Guardians would, but it's just two-character Curse of the Moon with more boring level design. I was so disappointed.
>I thought Gal Guardians would, but it's just two-character Curse of the Moon with more boring level design. I was so disappointed.
The fact Gal-Gua wasn't by Inti's Blaster Master Zero team but by some Gunvolt hacks makes it more disappointing
I remember looking up how to get the real ending and real boss in Aria of Sorrow, you have to grind for item drops, I did this for a couple minutes and never got a drop, then never played it again. Its pretty moronic they would do this, Its not even really told to the player which drops he needs either. Complete bullshit
Yeah they do, there are three books that describe the souls you need and a specific hint that they're important. Don't blame the game for your moronation.
It is the game's fault entirely. Just because you like to grind for obscure item drops to just get a real ending doesn't mean you're intelligent. If anything you're a mouthbreathing moron.
Are the souls really that obscure? I think I got all of them just from playing normally, but maybe I was just lucky. And I'm as moronic as they come, but I eventually figured it out when I was looking through the bestiary and realized 3 of the descriptions were worded exactly like the books.
But then I completely dropped the ball with DoS, because I missed the boss that gives you the mirror soul. The bad ending strongly suggests that you fricked something up with Dmitrii, so I started a whole new playthrough to try and do something differently before fighting him...
I never got any drops after grinding for them for a couple minutes and gave up
I get so lost in these games, that's probably how I got them. So much unintentional grinding from walking back and forth lol.
Are any of the 3D games worth playing?
Lament, 64, DC prototype, and Curse of Darkness are all pretty good.
Just keep in mind both Lament and Curse of Darkness are dungeon crawlers, not 3D metroidvanias.
man
I love 2d metroidvanias Castlevania
all of them
all of them deserve love,
maybe dawn of sorrow not so much
but all 7 of them
>maybe dawn of sorrow not so much
I liked it. I prefer PoR but DoS isn't bad
PoR is an underrated masterpiece tbh
I feel like it's the Igavania with the most content. It just has so much stuff in it. Maybe it's not that much of a deal now but I also remember being impressed at how many different voice samples the game has for a DS game and you can even switch to Japanese voices by holding L when choosing a mode in the main menu
PoR is awesome. At first I was worried the whole setup with the painting worlds was a sign of lazier map design, but they all turned out to be good fun to explore and the combat never gets boring with all the options you have between the 2 characters. Normally I just stick to spears and axes in these games, but I often found myself switching to Charlotte and tossing spells around just for the joy of it
Glad to see so much love for PoR here, I was getting use to see Ganker shitting on it because... just because?
Konami really needs to port these in a collection on modern hardware so I don't need to play gay ass handhelds.
moron-kun...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1552550/Castlevania_Advance_Collection/
DS Collection when
Hell yeah
GBA emulators have been around for nearly 20 years dude.
I really liked Circle of the moon, though the jump in difficulty with the final boss is pretty brutal.
Valkyrie ASS
Admission of guilt. I went through the whole sewer section in CotM w/o getting rid of the poison water ( or was it a key item or card you needed? ) I don't remember.
COTM is the best, hands down. Card system, great art, music, atmosphere, whip mechanics, challenging boss fights. I pretty much loved everything about this game except the low light, but that was a limitation of the gba itself, not the game. The others are good, too (except PoR), I just loved this one most.
Maria, Charlotte or Shanoa?
I realize not many people care about the lore, or at least Netflix writers don't, but I've come to an interesting conclusion. I'm playing through the franchise in timeline order[spoiler] and I got to Harmony of Dissonance.
It's interesting to see that Juste is using the whip in permanent morningstar mode, which I just first chalked up to begin a Metroidvania and not a Classicvania, but then I remembered Rondo comes next and Richter also has the permanent morningstar there as well despite it beign a Classicvania.
Unless the game explicitly explains the permanent morningstar to me, I'm going to assume those upgrades from Simon's Quest were permanent, except for the flame whip, the flame must've died down after a while.
Oh man I really fricked up that spoiler, I'm so sorry.
It's too late anon, they're gonna take your toes.
What's the best 3D Castlevania game?
Curse of Darkness, easily
My homie.
I love Curse of Darkness. I hope it gets a remaster or remake to redeem Hector's reputation among the general masses.
>just a cutscene
Frick I hate zoomers.
I was going to post a video of the fight itself, but it's just some guy cheesing Trevor in the corner over and over, and you don't play Trevor like that.
Btw, any word on when we might get another castlevania game? Iirc it’s been a long time (2014) since Konami paid attention to the franchise other than licensing it out for Netflix. Would be a real shame if they abandoned it. It’s not like the story in the games ever changes much, but still, it’s got a lot going for it and was pretty well-known.
We got a pretty decent mobile game two years ago and an insider whose leaks about Silent Hill and Metal Gear 3 remake were proven said that there's a Castlevania "reimagining" in development, so maybe soon. There's also that chink mobile game, but that's probably gonna suck.
I guess I'll go try the DS games again. I remember hating them after how great Circle and Aria are.
I went to Ganker out of morbid curiosity and there's this schizo that keeps posting how much he hates Curse of Darkness and wants to kill IGA and he's being completely serious. Why are other boards so weird about Castlevania?
Ganker and Ganker are worse since there's this Ayami Kojima hating homosexual that rageposts all the time without fail.
>hating Ayami Kojima
Such wretched homosexuality inspires revulsion in the hearts of men.