Throughout my Castlevania series playthrough I’ve been nervous about reaching the DS games. They regularly go for a high price on eBay and in any event, my trusty old 3DS has just about given up the ghost. Emulation is always an option, though the game’s touch-screen elements just wouldn’t be the same…
Enter the Steam Deck. Retroarch’s DeSmuME core gobbles up Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow without a hitch, you can configure it to toggle between the upper and lower screen on a button press and – best of all – the Deck can emulate the DS’s touchscreen perfectly.
And I’m very glad it does too, because Dawn of Sorrow rocks.
Throughout the franchise’s GameBoy Advance era Konami’s various teams were doing their best to squeeze a Symphony of the Night experience onto Nintendo’s handheld device. The results – particularly Aria of Sorrow – were impressive, though graphical and hardware restrictions meant they could never match the detailed splendour of the PSOne classic.
With Dawn of Sorrow we finally get a game that matches (and in some cases exceeds) the art of Symphony of the Night. Sprites have been redrawn at a higher resolution, backgrounds often make smart use of polygons to convey depth, it’s vivid without being garish (I’m looking at you, Harmony of Dissonance), and the game is bristling with great touches like snow tumbling off a creaking van when you hop onto its roof.
Soundwise things have also vastly improved with the jump to new hardware. I can appreciate the distinct sound of the GBA but let’s face it, it’s hardly the best sound chip around. My acid test in Castlevania is their rendition of “Vampire Killer”, and Dawn of Sorrow doesn’t disappoint:
As for the game itself? Well by this point Konami had pulled apart and reassembled the Metroidvania groove so many times they know the score, though Dawn of Sorrow delivers a very fun map to explore, a wide variety of weapons and demonic powers to unleash on enemies, and some very cool bosses.
As an early DS game it also leans on the newfangled touchscreen features. You draw sigils on the screen to finish off bosses, can control familiars with a stylus, and carve out paths through blocks. Dawn of Sorrow goes mercifully light on this stuff compared to some other DS games, so for me all this just about fell on the right side of gimmicky.
All that said it isn’t perfect. Later bosses with ginormous health pools practically mandate the use of specific skills that randomly drop from monsters. Playing without a walkthrough I ended up on the final boss at a decent level but without the right equipment, leading to a 45-minute battle I eventually lost. Take two saw victory, though by this point I just wanted to see the credits and leaned on save states.
While we almost certainly aren’t getting a new game anytime soon, the Castlevania Anniversary Collection and Castlevania Advance Collection show that Konami is at least interested in preserving the franchise. Whether we’ll ever get a “DS Collection” remains to be seen, as bringing over the touch-screen stuff sounds like a pain (though it’d work fine on Switch and Deck!).
Judging by my experience with Dawn of Sorrow I hope they do, as it seems like a shame a game this good is trapped on twenty-year-old hardware and isn’t available digitally.
Next up it’s a return to the PlayStation 2, for Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. Here’s hoping it’s less boring than Lament of Innocence…
Pixel Hunted 