Game:

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (2005)

Duration: 0:00

43 views

0

Originally recorded: October 6, 2024
---
Fun fact: this game wasn't originally on the docket for this year's round of voting for Hallow-streams. But when the Dominus Collection was basically shadow-dropped in the middle of voting, everyone agreed to just restart the poll from scratch with Dawn of Sorrow included... and it absolutely slaughtered everything else on offer. Truth be told, I've been wanting to stream DoS ever since I wrapped up AoS, but certain aspects of the game would've made it a lot more difficult under my current set-up. Fortunately, this modern port totally fixed that issue, so now it's time to play the last of the official IGAvanias.

From what I can tell, there's been this ongoing discussion about which game in the DS trilogy is considered best -- and if anything, the Dominus Collection seems to have fired it back up after a long dormant peace. While Aria absolutely eviscerates the other GBA games in terms of overall reception, Dawn is locked in an eternal struggle with the more experimental Order of Ecclesia. As a major Portrait of Ruin booster, I can't deny that I've always sort of resented the other two games for essentially making it "the worst DS Castlevania" by default. But I didn't hold that against OoE when I played that... and I'm going to do my best to give DoS the same treatment.

First impressions have been pretty good, though it almost seems like one of three things is going to happen: either this game's either going to be much shorter than anticipated, there's going to be a major plot twist in the second act or the story's just incredibly front-loaded. Because it looks like I basically killed one of the main antagonists in my third boss fight... and it really doesn't look like I skipped anything. On the other hand, I've only managed to find two of the game's five magic seals thus far, so maybe there's more to this than I'm expecting.

But alas, I ran into a roadblock at the end of this stream: one of those damn sliding block puzzles is going to be necessary to complete. I was hoping that I'd just sort of gotten ahead of myself and that there would be another area to explore, but based on all of the dead ends I encountered, it looks like that will be where I start things next time. I even consulted a guide about where you're "supposed to go" after the first fight with Dario... and sadly, it pointed me right back there. That's the problem with early-era DS games: they all tried to be clever when utilizing the handheld's gimmicks.

Let's just hope that I don't have to yell at the top of my lungs to beat the true final boss.