Review: Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
When I first started writing about games, I wrote about a lot of the bad games out there; I chose to focus on the
bad rather than the good, which makes the moniker “bitter” rather apt. However, these days I try to make educated
decisions about what I buy and play, if for no other reason than to conserve time. Who wants to waste time with
something sub-par? I also used to try to finish every game I played; now I don’t feel bad about quitting if the game
is junk.
The game I’m going to write about today isn’t bad, but horribly average — not bad enough for me to
simply drop, but not good enough for me to actually feel like my time was well spent. That game is, obviously,
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
Portrait of Ruin takes two kids (Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin) vaguely connected to the Belmont family on a quest through Dracula’s castle. Usually
when Drac’s castle appears, the bad dude himself makes an appearance as well. This time, however, another vampire
named Brauner is running amok through the castle, with nefarious plans to destroy humanity. The two vampire hunters
must explore the castle and foil Brauner.
I heartily applaud Koji Igarashi’s adherance to 2D gameplay.
There’s not much I like more than a well-made platform game. However, this game is almost exactly like every other
2D Castlevania game since 1997’s Symphony of the Night. I could accept the stale design if there were some new or
different environments to explore, but literally nothing has changed. A few minor additions do exist: there are two
playable characters, and one can be controlled by a weak AI for simultanious play (it follows you and tries to attack
enemies on its own). Some weapons are different (at least from the last GBA Castlevania that I played). Overall,
however, Portrait of Ruin is startlingly formulaic.
One (bad) change that the game actually made was abandoning the art of Ayami Kojima, who had done work on Symphony of the
Night and most of the GBA Castlevania games. The new art has an anime style that is not particularly appealing;
the characters look rather generic, and are kind of poorly designed. From an interview on
Gamasutra:
Well, I guess it remains to be seen if that younger audience is fit-grabbed, but it sure alienated me.
Sadly, it seems that I’ve spent enough time playing and writing about this game. If you’d like to play the
exact same darn Castlevania game that you’ve been playing for the last 10 years,
go pick up Portrait of Ruin. Otherwise, steer clear, and pick up some of the other great games the DS has to offer.
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