Mario Bautista
Konami and M2 have been treating the Castlevania series exceptionally well in recent years. Sure, we haven’t gotten any new entries, but they’ve been keeping the series’ backlog pretty fresh with the likes of the Castlevania Advance Collection and now the Castlevania Dominus Collection. This takes three of the series’ final “Metroidvania” outings from the Nintendo DS and brings them to every modern console.
The first of the bunch (located at the bottom of the main menu, curiously) is Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, the direct sequel to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. I had first played Aria of Sorrow about two years ago when the Advance Collection came out and felt it was a perfect iteration on what Castlevania: Symphony of the Night established. The second of the games, and the first in the series that I ever played, is Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. This has two playable characters instead of one, both with their own combat styles and gimmicks. Finally, you have the headliner game, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. If I had to rank the three I’d say it’d be Portrait of Ruin, Order of Ecclesia, and then Dawn of Sorrow. Maybe there’s a bit of nostalgia bias there, but I wasn’t really enjoying Dawn of Sorrow as much as I did Aria of Sorrow. I’d say all of these games are at least good enough to enjoy, especially with all the new quality-of-life features.
Each of these games has you side-scrolling in large maps, tackling the “Metroidvania” style in different ways. Dawn of Sorrow is just about the same as Aria of Sorrow and Symphony of the Night with a big single castle to explore, Portrait of Ruin has your castle whisk you away to smaller ones, and Order of Ecclesia tries to offer a more traditional linear Castlevania experience with the level design of the MV titles. They all have their place, and for the most part play with a lot of the same ideas in how gameplay and progression work.
You also get to see the team grow more confident with the hardware over time, leading to the games feeling more polished with each entry. Playing the slow Dawn of Sorrow to eventually get to Order of Ecclesia with fast-paced combos? It’s a great experience to see it all play out. It’s a hard thing to describe, but these feel more responsive than they ever did back when I played them on DS. And in between both of those see the team really experiment with their puzzle design by having two characters who can interact with the world at the same time. It’s really cool, and it makes me a bit sad that after these games Konami shifted away from this style of game.
Each of these games has never looked better than in this collection, M2 really outdid themselves. While I have various problems with each of the games here (Dawn of Sorrow in particular meanders for most of its runtime), how they come across visually is simply sublime. Backgrounds are presented at a higher resolution, especially the 3D assets. The pixel art itself is wonderfully crisp. You have about five different screen settings to display the dual-screen presentation in different ways based on your preference. There are some traditional layouts that will keep the information exclusive to the two screens as before, prioritizing how you want to display both. My preference is the default, with a new third screen that can keep enemy information alongside your map.
These feel less like emulation and more like a port job with how seamlessly the modern additions have been integrated. Dawn of Sorrow’s contentious touch screen gimmicks have now largely been mapped to buttons for one, which would be absolute showstoppers as they were mandatory to defeat bosses. With added features like the ability to rewind the game at any point while playing, even fumbling the button execution in this new version can be remedied to save you some time. For a more practical example: accidentally hit the Start button to skip an important story cutscene? Quickly hold the rewind button and scroll back to the exact moment the cutscene was still going. You’re probably going to use this often for bosses if we’re going to be real though. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.
It is worth mentioning that if you play this game on the Nintendo Switch undocked you have full usage of the touch screen, but the same thing can be emulated with the thumbsticks if you are playing on another platform or docked. For me, playing these games in handheld mode just felt perfect, especially in a game like Dawn of Sorrow which uses the touchscreen frequently for various room gimmicks. The ice walls you can break bit by bit with the stylus? This is manageable now with your finger, and it’s responsive as well. It makes these games feel at home on the portable home console.
The Castlevania Dominus Collection has made me realize that this specific era of Castlevania might be my favorite overall. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow used to be my favorite game in the series, but I’d be hard-pressed to recommend the other titles in that collection because they feel unfocused and unpolished. At the very least, there’s a pretty big gap in quality between them. Even if I’m not very fond of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, I think this collection has a lot of value in it. This is when this specific kind of Castlevania game started to really branch out and experiment, with most of those experiments being very successful. This is the definitive way to play three of the most interesting Castlevanias, better than I ever dreamed they would be. I think the Nintendo DS being such an experimental console encouraged the original developers to try a lot of fun things, and I hope the feedback to these games is strong enough to make Konami want to revisit this style.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Konami
