Castlevania: Circle of the Moon [GBA]

I'm telling you right now that I hate this game. I urge most of you to stop right there, as whenever I mention that I find the post-SotN Castlevania's to be crap-tacular I am almost always met with "YOU ARE A SIMPLE-MINDED FOOL." So if you're one of those people, just stop right now. Go take a walk instead, maybe. Or you might even go get some sweet and sour chicken; I always find that enjoyable. The rest of you, go ahead and keep reading if you want.

Of course, this is all acting like I actually have more than four to six readers. Those four to six of you, please ignore my ego stroking. Please? ; 3; Anyway.

To start off, this game doesn't even star a Belmont (in fact, the Belmonts are never even mentioned), which you wouldn't even know unless you actually pay attention to the story (and, really, who's going to?) as he has the same Belmont shuffle. In other words, by all accounts he is a cripple. That is, until you get an item that lets you run around...by double tapping on the D-pad. So to get around anywhere at anything resembling a reasonable speed, you'll be doing this for the whole game. This is not how you make a good game.

Next is length. This game is long. Long, long, long, long, long. And it has been praised for it. Chrono Trigger was 20 hours of fantastic, and now people bitch if the play time doesn't reach a minimum of 50 hours. But that's another rant. The problem is the length doesn't come from an abundance of content, it comes from artificial padding. While it does have multiple gameplay modes, you only get this after beating the game once, then another after beating it in one style, then another. This is further hurt by the experience not being good the first time. The gameplay modes "shake things up" by either making you focus on physical combat, magical combat, or using just sub-weapons. If I didn't like it the first time, then forcing me to play in a way that I don't want to isn't going to make me like it any more. This is not how you make a good game.

And more artificial extension comes in backtracking. Backtracking, backtracking, and more backtracking. Sometimes it's legitimately to get to a new area, but most of the time it's just to get more widgets. No "As long as I'm here, I'll get all the stuff here." or "As long as I'm here again, I'll get all the stuff that I can get now." No, you have to go back to areas to specifically to get some arbitrary powerup. This is not how you make a good game.

And speaking of all those widgets, most of them are hidden behind breakable walls. You will find most of these by luck, if at all. The problem is is that there are almost no visual clues as to where they lie. There is just a minuscule discrepancy in said walls, and I can't imagine ever being able to see it on the original GBA's dark as fuck screen. To find all of them you'll probably be swinging around at the walls or going up against them with an area of effect spell active trying to find the damn things, and that's not how you make a good game.

But none of those are my biggest gripes. My biggest gripe is, in fact, grinding. By adding in RPG elements in the form of stats and experience and completely fucking up in the process, you now have to kill enemies in the same area over and over again for hours before you can go on to the next area or every single normal enemy turns into a mini-boss. But the grinding is not just for levels. No, the enemies are also your main source of items, equipment, and the necessary items for your magic, cards. The only other place you're going to get stuff is candlesticks for hearts and subweapons, of course. The problem is that, like the breakable walls, there's absolutely no indication of which monsters hold what. And not only that, the probability of whether or not a monster will actually drop one of their items is wholly dependent on your stats, so even if you do figure out which monster drops what, you might not even get said item even if you grind said enemy for hours. Even then, when you do get magic cards, the game doesn't even tell you what they do until you activate them and stumble upon how they work. This can take forever to find out, and when you finally do, it's most likely worthless and you could have been using magic that was actually useful instead of wasting your time figuring out the others. All this is not how you make a good game.

Last complaint. In action-adventure games, the whole point is to find items that both help you in combat and to get around, otherwise you're just wasting your time. However. There is a boss in here that you have to defeat to get an item that you only use once to clean up some water. That's right, you fight a boss just to get a key. This is not how you make a good game.

All in all, Castlevania: CotM hits all the trappings of both bad RPGs and bad action-adventure games, so it fails double. Fuck this game.