63. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA)
My eventual goal is to play every Castlevania game ever made, at least the more mainstream released. Castlevania is one of those accliamed franchises that I am woefully behind on, having only beat a handful of entries in the series. For the next Castlevania I tackled, I referred to the infinite wisdom of the internet to recommend me a really good entry in the series I haven't played yet. Of course, Symphony of the Night was recommended constantly, but having beat that game already, I opted for what is commonly considered the second best game in the Castlevania series, Aria of Sorrow. While I was thoroughly impressed with Aria of Sorrow, I feel like some of the praise this game gets is a bit overblown, mostly due to the limitations of its platform.
Aria of Sorrow is absolutely an excellent game. As a metroidvania style entry in the series, you're given a huge map to explore at your leisure. Of course, you'll have to come back to certain portions of the map later on once you've obtained a specific ability to access it, but this formula is what really makes Aria of Sorrow and similar metrovania Castlevania games so good and addictive. Like Symphony of the Night, there are a ton of abilities you can obtain. As mentioned, some of these are used to progress through the castle, while others are used to boost stats, give you new secondary weapons, and some just have strange effects that can be useful in some situations. This is all coupled with an RPG-like leveling system that also leans on the use of items to boost stats. In a way, Aria of Sorrow and other early metroidvanias almost feel like 2D precursors to the Souls games. This is even more evident in the plethora of horrow themed enemies and bosses you'll encounter throughout the game. Pretty much everything from zombies, killer plants, spider women, harpies, demons, and just about everything else you can think of that would fit well into a horror movie are present in Aria of Sorrow. The bosses are all mostly larger than life and require different strategies and abilities to beat. All this culminated in an incredibly fun, rewarding, and just straight up addictive gameplay experience for the most part. However, there are absolutely annoyances and problems that I encountered despite the game being very well made overall.
For starters, the difficulty balancing is all over the place in the game. While I'd say the first third of the game has a progressive difficulty that straddles that line between being hard, but fun, the game sees a massive spike in difficulty once you reach the Death boss. However, this spike is only briefly present until you're given access to a series of items later on that are so OP'ed that I was taking out enemies and bosses that would have otherwise been way, way harder to defeat. As I quickly leveled after destroying them, I found myself so powerful that the rest of the game was a relative piece of cake. Keep in mind, this was at roughly the halfway mark in the game. Way more time and effort should have been spent on the difficulty balancing in this game in order to maintain that excellent difficulty/fun ratio that the game does a pretty good job at during the first third of Aria of Sorrow. My second biggest grievance is the fact that you'll be relying on healing items a fair bit during some of the more hectic sections of the game, however unless you're lucky enough to stumble upon them throughout the map, you'll mostly be relying on the game's lone shop to buy them with money you collect by smashing lanterns and killing enemies. This shop is located at the very beginning of the game and requires a decent amount of backtracking to get to. Even with the minor aid of teleportation rooms scattered throughout the game, it is alwasy a pain in the ass to have to go all the way back to the beginning of the map if you need to stock up on items or buy more powerful gear. There are plenty of save point rooms throughout the game. Hell, there are also quite a few empty rooms with new purpose in Aria of Sorrow. Why couldn't one of those just have been a shop room? It's just bad gameplay design and something I'm surprised was overlooked. Other than that, I could nitpick various small things that created minor annoyances during my time in Aria of Sorrow, but just know 90% of my issues with this game belonged to the two major faults mentioned above.
Aria of Sorrow's presentation is very impressive for a handheld. While this game could never look as good as Symphony of the Night given its hardware limitations on the GBA, it does a good enough job with what it has to deliver a game I seldom could fault from a visual standpoint. Perhaps my biggest issue with the visuals in how derivative many of the enemies and bosses are compared to other Castlevania games, especially Symphony of the Night. I would have definitely liked to see some more originality in that department, while also having some of those series staples that most entries possess. I get that his is the same Dracula's castle from many of the previous games either, but I would have also liked to see it get more of a makeover too seeing how some of the sections of the castle were ripped from Symphony of the Night, albeit with a different layout, different enemies, and slightly altered visuals. And while it's not necessarily the fault of the game given the limited hardware capabilities of the GBA, but the map and overall game just felt a lot more basic, shallow, and shorter than it did in Symphony of the Night. For what it is though, I have little to complain about in Aria of Sorrow from a visual presentation perspective and absolutely loved what I was looking at most of the time.
Finally, the audio in Aria of Sorrow is pretty top notch when it comes to GBA OSTs. Again, limitations of the GBA are what primarily kept the game's audio from being amazing, but that's not to say it wasn't very good, because it absolutely is. The OST is catchy and well done as in most Castlevania games. Unfortunately, this games story and characters would have benefits from some sort of voice acting, if that were possible. Instead, dialogue is delivered through text boxes which just don't have the same punch as a well implemented voice acting cast. Once again, I'm going to compare this to Symphony of the Night which did have voice acting. Even though the dialogue was hammy and not always done well, the original english dib of Symphony of the Night has become the stuff of legends and the game's overall charm would have suffered without it, as it does in Aria of Sorrow.
Before I get to my closing thoughts of Aria of Sorrow, I'm well aware that I've mentioned Symphony of the Night in this review a ton of times, probably to some people's annoyance. Seeing how Symphony of the Night cane out 7-years before this game and set the standard for all metroidvania games in the series that followed, its the benchmark I use for determining how good the other games are. Symphony of the Night is one of my favorite games of all time so the other Castlevania games get to reaching its greatness, the better the game is. Aria of Sorrow falls noticeably short of Symphony of the Night in nearly every conceivable way, with the main factor for this being the system it was developed for. Had Aria of Sorrow been developed for the PS2 or Gamecube, I have no doubt that it would have given Symphony of the Night way more of a run for its money. Instead, Aria of Sorrow is an impressive handheld game and one of the best on the GBA. Even with the limitations of the GBA, Aria of Sorrow still stands as one of the best Castlevania games I've played, second only to...you guessed it, and also possibly Lords of Shadow, but I haven't played that game in nearly 15 years so I'll hold off on that comparison for now. I'm really excited about playing the other games in the series, especially the other metroidvania games to see how they stack up against Aria of Sorrow, especially the other GBA and DS games. Perhaps Aria of Sorrow will become my new gold standard for the handheld metroidvania games. It certainly was good enough to potentially be that for me. (5/29/25) [40/50]
