Castlevania Dominus Collection

I have played a lot of Metroidvanias. I have also paid embarrassing secondary-market prices for DS cartridges. So when Konami shadow-dropped this collection during a Nintendo Direct in August 2024 with zero advance notice, my reaction was equal parts delight and mild irritation that it took this long. The wait was worth it. The three core games here are Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia, originally released on DS between 2005 and 2008. Each one takes Koji Igarashi's Symphony of the Night blueprint in a deliberately different direction. Dawn of Sorrow sticks closest to that template: Soma Cruz returns, the soul-absorption system lets you absorb enemy abilities and build an enormous catalogue of sub-weapons, stat boosts, and transformations, and the single large castle map should feel immediately comfortable to anyone who has touched Aria of Sorrow. The catch is that it is very much a refinement rather than a reinvention, and the Magic Seal quick-time mechanic originally tied to the DS touchscreen survives here as cursor-driven input that ranges from mildly fiddly to briefly annoying. Portrait of Ruin swaps the single-castle design for a portrait-hopping structure that whisks protagonist duo Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin through self-contained worlds ranging from a London Underground station to Ancient Egypt. The dual-character system, where you swap between fighters and combine their powers for team attacks like the crowd-pleasing 1,000 Blades, is clever enough that the occasional awkwardness of managing two characters is forgivable. Some of the inverted portrait revisits feel padded and repetitive, which is exactly the kind of filler grind I have no patience for, but the sheer variety of environments keeps things fresher than it sounds. Order of Ecclesia is the collection's crown jewel for good reason. Shanoa is one of the better protagonists in the franchise's history: an amnesiac warrior who absorbs Glyphs to build her combat toolkit, tasked with tracking down a former ally across a more linear, stage-based world map that separates it architecturally from the other two games. The story, for once, actually pays off its setup. The Glyph system rewards experimentation in ways that hold up well past the midgame, and the optional village-rescue side quests give you a reason to care about the world beyond just clearing rooms for experience. The presentation work done by M2 is quietly impressive. Adapting dual-screen DS games to a single widescreen display could have been a disaster; instead, the gameplay occupies the left portion of the screen while a persistent map and status panel sit on the right, keeping all the information you need visible without pausing. Quick saves, a rewind feature for the DS titles, regional version switching, control remapping per game, a music player with playlist support, a Gallery Mode, and a newly added Encyclopedia round out a package that clearly had people who care working on it. A minor criticism: Haunted Castle Revisited, the collection's genuinely exciting bonus, does not support save states or rewind the way the DS titles do, which is an odd omission. Haunted Castle Revisited deserves its own paragraph. The original 1988 arcade Haunted Castle is included here as a historical curiosity, and the historical verdict on it is that it is brutally unfair and not particularly enjoyable. The Revisited remake, however, is a full end-to-end redesign with new pixel art that evokes a late-90s arcade aesthetic, significantly improved controls, and a difficulty that challenges without punishing unfairly. It also received a post-launch Boss Rush Mode update. For a game billed as a bonus in the Extras tab, it is a more substantial piece of work than most studios ship as a main release. The whole collection sits at 95 percent positive across over a thousand Steam reviews, which tracks: the flaws here are real but minor. The soul drop grind in Dawn of Sorrow can test your patience if you are chasing 100 percent completion, some linearity in Portrait of Ruin outstays its welcome, and players who missed Aria of Sorrow (which is in the separate Advance Collection) will hit a few story context gaps in Dawn. None of that changes the fact that this is the definitive and frankly only legitimate way to play three of the most interesting entries in a franchise that has been dormant for too long.

Monika · Scout Team

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